Of Heroes and Monsters
by TheDoctorIsMyGuardian
Summary: It was during a regular mission when the world crashed down on the Avengers and changed their lives forever. They're up to a challenging but rewarding journey in an effort to make a girl's world a little better, and might be surprised to discover their own worlds filling with just a little bit more light.
1. Prisoner

The sounds of explosions and falling debris were deafening. Dark purple flames were shooting around the air, scalding hot and leaving desolation in their wake. There was so much dust in the air even breathing became difficult, and a middle-aged man whose eyes glowed as purple as the fire was laughing above the commotion, sending pulses of energy in their direction.

So far, it was business as usual for the Avengers.

The building looked like it might collapse any second, but it wasn't much different before the fight broke out. Admittedly, none of it was burning before their arrival, but the quick looks Steve had time for before the enemy attacked showed quite a bit of fire damage to the walls and some of the supporting pillars, no doubt the results of the man's crazed rage. They still didn't know his name, which was quite inconvenient, but as Tony put it, he wouldn't need one where he's going.

The fire shooting out of his hands was interesting, though. Bruce seemed fascinated when Coulson debriefed them. An incident in a nuclear facility leading to a development of a natural genetic mutation, remaining dormant for decades before erupting about a year earlier, apparently. The guy laid low since, staying inside the abandoned three-stories building almost all the time, but eventually the rather violent sounds from within the building became noticed. That was where SHIELD stepped in, and the Avengers shortly after. Their instructions were simple enough: bring the man in, use force if necessary, but try not to kill him unless a member of the team or a civilian is in danger. It made sense; even in the 21st century, Steve didn't suppose people with an unknown type of energy flowing through their veins were a common occurrence.

The man's laughter was unnerving. "You will all burn!" he declared with a certainty. "This power inside of me – I can feel it! It is endless!" He grinned, and the smile twisted his face into something horrid. "I have been chosen," he whispered, and for a moment his eyes stopped glowing and he stopped shooting. He looked up, his eyes unfocused, like a man who sees the light of heaven, though Steve had a feeling this wasn't the case. "Chosen…" he muttered, "chosen to be the first of many. A new humanity!"

"Hey, smart guy!" called Tony, opening his helmet so that he's properly heard. "How are you planning to spread that thing across an entire race?"

The man's smile widened. "It is in my genes. Through me, evolution shall do its magic. The power shall breed and multiply until there is nothing, nothing in the whole universe left untouched!"

"Yeah, that makes no sense," persisted Tony. "Say you have tons of kids and they all get this frankly awesome purple thing – which I doubt – it's still not going to cover a whole planet, never mind the whole universe."

The man laughed again. "I never said everyone," he said. "My new humanity shall rain fire upon the old and useless – natural selection, if you like."

"And you expect us to just sit aside and watch that happen?" asked Steve.

"Not at all, my friend, not at all!" he assured him in a manner that promised he wasn't anywhere near considering him his friend. "In fact, I now give you a choice: you may be removed with the rest of the inferior men, or you may become a part of my new world! You have proven yourselves to be more than the worthless humans – you are like me."

"Now, that's where you're wrong," said Steve forcefully. "We aren't like you, and we never will be."

"Suit yourselves," said the man with an indifferent shrug. He swung his arm, ready to fire again, but it was grabbed unexpectedly. Before he could react or even see who it was, his feet were kicked from underneath him and he was on his back, Natasha holding him down.

"Do not touch me, you vile being!" yelled the man in rage.

"Oh, shut up," sighed Natasha exasperatedly, pulling a syringe out of her pocket and sinking it into his neck. He went still in seconds.

"Good job, Nat," said Steve, nodding in her direction. She rewarded him with a brief smile before switching on her comm and reporting to Fury.

"Well, that was tedious," commented Tony, observing the unconscious form on the floor, noting to himself he looked significantly less impressive now than he was just a minute before. He was unshaved and his dark hair was oily and unkempt, and his clothes looked ages old. His overall impression of the guy was that he could really use a bath.

"We're not done yet," Steve reminded him. "We need to make sure he didn't leave us any surprises. How are you holding up, Bruce?"

"Not too bad," replied the scientist, who was now back in his human form. "Pretty grateful for the new arrangement, though," he added, pulling on the shirt he kept in his pocket. SHIELD has design some ultra-stretching pants for him, with large pockets at his request.

"Yeah, we're all grateful for that," joked Tony. Bruce smiled sheepishly.

"Tony, focus," said Steve. "We need to look this place over. Bruce, Natasha and Clint – take this floor. Thor, Tony, the one above us. I'm going to take the basement."

"Aye, aye, Captain," said Tony sarcastically and only slightly bitterly.

"You will search the basement by yourself?" asked Thor uncertainly.

"I've looked over the blueprints of the building, it's pretty small. Shouldn't be anything out of the ordinary there, but just in case, keep your comms on. Report anything unusual, I don't want any incidents. If anything goes wrong because we missed something Fury will have all our heads."

"Yikes," said Tony before his helmet clicked shut and he flew up to the floor above them, creating a Tony shaped hole in the ceiling. Steve rolled his eyes before slowly and carefully taking the stairs down, shield in hand, alert and prepared to fight if anything attacks him.

The basement was… strange. Steve strongly doubted it looked like that when the building was first built. It must have been redesigned, though he wasn't sure for what purpose.

Half of the room was blocked with a row of metal bars, like of prison cells. Every ten feet or so, a white wall stretched from the bars to the far end of the room, creating separate cells. He couldn't see the furthest one, and the presence of the cells made him wonder if they were here when the maniac took residence in the abandoned building or if he added it himself. He honestly couldn't tell.

Hesitantly, he resumed his careful walking along the metal bars. The first cell was completely empty. So was the second one.

In the months to come he would find himself wondering how different things would have turned out had that last cell been empty as well, or if it was someone else to check the basement rather than him.

There were several things that differed in the third cell and made it unlike the others. For one, the two walls weren't just blank white; they were written on with what looked like a black crayon, but it wasn't nonsensical enough to be the work of the man they've just defeated. This writing made sense. There were whole, long and separate paragraphs, sometimes marked with headlines. Occasionally there were what seemed to be whole pages when the paragraphs didn't stop for quite long. On the third wall, the one right in front of him, was only one word, written in big, capital letters and looked like it was written again and again with many layers of the crayon:

_**PRISONER**_

The writer was inside that cell, too, and Steve felt his inside go cold when he saw her. She was sitting on a floor (which was also written on) littered with the remains of black crayons. She was wearing a dirty and crumpled sleeveless shirt that revealed bruised and burnt arms and a worn pair of jeans. All her clothes were torn in several places, and the tears in her shirt revealed a frightfully thin figure. She was barefoot. Her hair was brown and had an unhealthy look to it, and was shapelessly tangled. Her fingers were toying with a crayon in a way that was everything but absent-minded. It was as if her whole existence focused on that crayon in a fierce, violent way. None of that was the worst.

She was just a kid, no more than fifteen years old. And when that sunk in, the insane man's words became clear to Steve very suddenly.

_"It is in my genes. Through me, evolution shall do its magic. The Power shall breed and multiply until there is nothing."_

_He's already started_, realized Steve with horror. _He's started years ago, probably without even knowing it._

Despite how shocking it was, the age of the girl was by no means the only thing that Steve noticed, though by far the most significant. Her eyes were something he thought he would never be able to forget. An ordinary hazel in color, drowned in dark circles, it was the expression in them that made him incapable of looking away. There was something very broken deep inside them, something there shouldn't be in the eyes of any teenage girl, but even deeper inside there was something more. The look she gave him wasn't one of anger or fear. It was a very clear questioning look. He could almost hear the questions in his head. _Which one are you?_ the look asked him, somewhere deep within him. _Are you one of the good or one of the bad? And will you hurt me?_ It unsettled him how fearless the look seemed.

"Is he dead?" she asked quietly. "The man upstairs, did you kill him?"

"He's alive," said Steve, unsure. "But he's unconscious. We're going to take him in."

"And then what?" she asked. "Would he go to prison? You know, don't you?"

"He's going to go to prison," confirmed Steve.

"You're Captain America, aren't you?"

"Er, yeah."

"So… are you here with all the Avengers, or is it just you?"

"The rest of the team is here, too, yes," said Steve.

"Huh," she said thoughtfully. "I had some friends who really liked you." Then she was silent again.

"What's your name?" asked Steve.

"Jess," said the girl.

"Nice to meet you, Jess," said Steve, forcing a smile.

Jess frowned. "Why are you smiling?" she asked, sounding honestly confused.

Steve's smile dropped. "Er…" he began.

"Sorry," said Jess quickly, seeing his embarrassment. "I just meant- you don't have to try to pretend the situation isn't really shitty. I know it is."

"Right," mumbled Steve, and chose a different tactic. He crouched down so that he was more or less at eye level with Jess (he really didn't enjoy talking down to her and had a feeling she didn't enjoy being talked down to). If she understood what he was doing, she didn't show it. "Jess, who's the man upstairs?" he asked seriously.

"His name is Lawrence Cory," replied Jess. "You probably noticed, but he's insane and can create and control purple energy, though it's probably not really energy, since energy can't be created and all that. I just call it energy because I don't have a better name for it."

"I mean, who is he to you?" asked Steve gently.

Jess's face drained of the little color that was in it. She swallowed, hard, before opening her mouth to reply, only to shut it so tight her lips became thin lines. She blinked several times and her grip on the crayon tightened before she could speak. "My name…" she whispered slowly, "is Jessica Cory. Lawrence Cory…" she hesitated and looked at Steve, as if begging him to tell her he knew what she was going to say and that she didn't have to say it. And Steve did know what she was going to say, but he needed to hear it before he could believe it. "He's my dad," she completed with difficulty. "Lawrence Cory is my father."

And the world stopped, just for a moment, before crashing down on Steve with all its force.

Steve was on his feet in an instant. "We've got a situation," he said urgently through his comm. "Get down here, now." He looked over at Jess, who looked back at him wide-eyed. "I'm going to break the lock of the door, okay?" he asked her with all the calmness he could muster. She nodded quickly and he smashed his shield against the lock. The door opened immediately with a loud creak and a painful lack of grace.

"Can you stand?" he asked Jess. She began to panic slightly at the question, her eyes shining and looking around frantically, her mouth opening and closing in silence. "Jess," said Steve hard yet gently. "Jess, look at me." She forced herself to look into his eyes. "Can you stand for me?"

"I –" she stuttered. "He burned my feet." Her eyes widened while Steve stared in shock, as if she only just realized it, like she didn't think much about it up until that moment. "He burned my feet so that I wouldn't run." She gripped the crayon even harder as tears threatened to fall out of her eyes and onto her cheeks.

"Steve, what's up?" asked Clint's voice. Steve looked over and saw the whole team quickly making their way over. "You sounded really freaked out on the- oh."

Jess tried to shrink away as much as possible as their eyes bore into her.

"Oh, f-" Tony nearly swore, cut short by a half-hearted kick from Natasha.

"Are you alright?" Bruce asked Jess in a concerned tone. She seemed just a tiny bit less tense after hearing him, but she couldn't find it in her to reply.

"I'll explain on the way," said Steve curtly. He just wanted to get Jess the hell out of there as soon as possible. He stored his shield on his back and approached Jess. He gave her an honest look that somehow momentarily convinced her not to back away from him and scooped her up in his arms, trying not to feel alarmed at how light she was or think about how she kept a firm hold of the crayon in one hand.

"Whoa, Steve, what are you doing?" demanded Tony.

"She's coming with us," said Steve harshly.

"Where, to SHIELD headquarters? Fury would go ballistic!"

"Natasha, call the jet," ordered Steve, ignoring Tony. He didn't particularly care about what Fury might say at the moment, and anyway he doubted anyone would say anything at all once everything is explained. "Tell them the guy's name is Lawrence Cory and that we're taking his kid."

Even though he didn't check, Steve could hear Tony's shocked expression in his tone when he let out a scandalized "_What_?" over Natasha's urgent speaking into the comm.

"Oh my god," muttered Bruce.

"He has kept his own daughter locked away in a cell like that?" Thor blurted, sounding furious. "That is insane!"

"Yeah, well, he didn't sound too sane just now, did he?" Clint pointed out.

"Shut up, Clint," snapped Natasha and turned to Jess. "What's your name?"

"Jess," she murmured.

"Jess, stay calm, alright? We're gonna get you somewhere safe, don't worry," Natasha assured her.

Jess just nodded, but something in her expressed at least partial trust.

In the rush to get to the jet, nobody noticed Tony didn't immediately follow. For just a few seconds he stood in his spot in front of Jess's cell and looked at the walls and the floor. He didn't read much, but he's read enough to know two things:

A. Jessica Cory was a genius.

B. She was more damaged than anyone Tony has ever met, which was saying something. He didn't know how much of that damage could still be repaired.

* * *

When they reached the jet, Jess went out of Steve's arms and onto a medic's care, leaving the Avengers free to discuss everything their latest mission has thrown in their faces.

"Look, I don't know how long she's been there!" said Steve, frustrated by the many questions that were fired at his direction.

"Just tell us, from the start, everything that's happened," said Clint warily.

Steve sighed. "She asked me if we killed Cory. I told her we didn't and that we were going to take him in and eventually lock him up. Then she asked if I was Captain America and whether I was on my own or with the rest of you, to which I answered. I asked her what her name was and about Cory, and she told me his name and that he's her father. When I asked if she could walk she said he's burned her feet so that she couldn't leave. At the moment, it was enough for me."

"He _burned her feet_?" repeated Bruce, shocked. "So the burns and bruises on her arms, that was him, too?"

"Maybe, I don't know!"

"Well, shit," murmured Clint. "I mean, I knew he was crazy before, but… Jesus!"

"Did you see the walls?" asked Tony. "There's no question about it, it's written right there. _Prisoner_. That's what she was. She was a prisoner of her own father." It really put his own daddy-issues in perspective.

"Do you think…" began Clint hesitantly, "that stuff he said about his powers being genetic… you don't think… she's got them, too?"

"She can't!" insisted Thor. "Would she not have fought back by now had she been able to?"

"Maybe she tried," Bruce speculated. "Maybe that's what earned her all these burns."

"She can't have them," said Natasha, but she didn't sound sure. "Not yet, anyway. It was dormant in Cory for what, twenty years?"

"But we don't know how is works," Tony pointed out. "Hell, we don't even know what it is. Maybe there is no permanent time of dormancy. For all we know… she might."

"I'm sure we'll find out when we get there," muttered Steve uncertainly.

"Unless Fury or the Council decide we shouldn't," Clint pointed out.

They fell into an uneasy silence, each deep in their own thoughts.

* * *

It was a short flight, but it felt longer than it actually was to everyone involved. Jess emerged from the jet on a stretcher with two SHIELD medics and was rolled away to a more efficient medical room (apparently all they could actually do on the jet was mostly diagnostic as the equipment there was meant for more dangerous injuries) almost instantly, and the Avengers were led to a room with a long table and many chairs in which Coulson and Fury were waiting, Fury looking like he was ready to shoot someone's head off.

"Does any of you feel like explaining to me why there is a teenage girl in my secret base?" demanded Fury.

"The power-hungry maniac we just brought it, Lawrence Cory, is her father," said Clint.

"Well, let me rephrase, then. Why is an insane criminal's teenage girl in my secret base?"

"He was keeping the kid locked up," snapped Tony. "He's been abusing her using his powers. She can't even walk because he burned her feet so that she wouldn't try to escape."

"We're supposed to be helping people," agreed Bruce. "That girl needed help."

"And you couldn't get her to a hospital, couldn't you?" Fury asked sarcastically. "Taking her on the jet with you was the only possible thing you could have done?"

"Look, Cory, he… he said something about his powers being genetic," explained Tony. "His plan was to change the definition of being human through some kind of quickened evolution. If what he said was correct, wouldn't SHIELD want to check her? See if _her_ eyes can glow in the dark?"

Fury looked thoughtful for several moments before speaking again. "Do you know anything about the girl's mother?" he asked. "Any other family she might have?"

They all shook their heads, and Fury grumbled and turned to Coulson. "Get a team looking into it. Tell them to find records of Jessica Cory and find out if there's anyone we should be worried about. Now." Coulson nodded and exited the room.

Fury looked over the Avengers. "I'll need to send in some agents for the official cleanup," he informed them. "Anything else inside that building I should know about?"

"No, sir," said Steve. "The only thing out of the ordinary is Jess's cell."

"What about the cell?" asked Fury with a frown.

"Nothing, uh…" Steve hesitated, "she had this crayon- well, several, actually, and she wrote on the walls and floor. I imagine that was about the only thing she had to do when she was in that cell, and who knows how long that was."

"I'll let them know," said Fury. "You're free to leave, we will call you in when you're next needed."

"And what of the child?" asked Thor.

"She will be handled properly," said Fury. "No unnecessary harm will come to her, you have my word."

"Whoa, hang on, _unnecessary_?" Tony frowned. "You mean she might be _necessarily_ hurt?"

Fury sighed. "Don't take my words too literally, Stark," he warned.

"With all due respect, sir, Tony has a point," said Steve. "Can you promise she will not be harmed at all?"

"I cannot," admitted Fury. "But that is only because I don't know just what kind of goddamn tests the lab's gonna run to check for powers we still don't understand, or how invasive they may be. With things we don't know anything about, it's usually more invasive than most people are comfortable with. But she will not be harmed unless it is needed."

"That's not good enough," said Steve calmly.

"Excuse me?" Fury raised an eyebrow. "And you suggest what, exactly? Let her walk around with the potential power to wipe out a frankly significant part of the world's population?"

"Look, she's been through a lot," said Steve. "She should at least be allowed to pick up the pieces before you people cut her open and start poking around to see if she pokes back."

"As is my intention," said Fury. "Despite what you may like to think, Captain, I don't tend to be cruel towards people I have no reason to be cruel to, and I doubt I was ever cruel to anyone who still can't legally get a driver's license. I'm told the kid's injuries are being looked to as we speak, and she will be allowed a few days before we question her. In the meantime, she will be given clean clothes and a decent place to stay in. Is that good enough for you, Captain Rogers?"

Steve didn't answer straight away, but his eyes never once waver and pierced right through Fury's. "I want to be present in her questioning," he declared.

"I'll second that," Tony piped up, raising a hand in the air.

"Me too, sir," said Natasha.

"Am I to understand that all of the Avengers are going to be present?" asked Fury, looking irritated.

They exchanged looks.

"We're the first people who don't want to hurt her she's seen in god knows how long," said Bruce tentatively. "I think it's best if we're there."

"And people think I run things here," sighed Fury. "Fine. I'll call you in when we're ready for her. Now if you all excuse me, I have to find somewhere for a possibly dangerous kid to reside."

"Actually, I think I might be able to save you the trouble," said Tony. "She can stay in the Tower for a few days, if that's alright by you."

Fury looked at him with disbelief. "Are you telling me you're willing to house a stranger kid just like that?" he asked.

"I did say philanthropist, didn't I?" Tony reminded him. "And Pepper would be cool with it. She'd be thrilled, she loves kids. And it's not like I'm short of space."

"Why is it every time you talk I find myself considering early retirement?" asked Fury.

"I'm serious."

"Well, if you're sure. But I ain't letting you back out on that one. If you decide it's too much for you, you're still stuck with her until it's time to bring her back in."

"Gotcha. I'll keep that in mind."

"Now get out, all of you," barked Fury. "I'll have her brought to the Tower when the medics are done. And anything suspicious, any new information you get, anything she might say – you report to me immediately. That goes for all of you." He gave them all a dark look, as if to say he mistrusted their abilities to keep tabs on Jess and that he'd have liked it much better had the whole Avengers Initiative thing never even happened.

"Yes, sir," said Tony with a mock salute on his way out of the room.

* * *

The Avengers Tower was obnoxiously prominent, Jess decided.

Not that it wasn't impressive. It was. But it was impossible to walk by it without at least sparing it a glance or, more commonly, staring at it and trying to get a glimpse of its top (which was virtually impossible as the Tower was ridiculously and unnecessarily tall). Jess always was an introvert, but circumstances have made her even less comfortable with attention, so it was difficult for her to adjust to the idea of staying in the Avengers Tower, even for just a week.

She couldn't tell how long she's been at the headquarters. It must have been hours, but she couldn't tell for sure. When she first arrived a female agent with a cold expression walked beside the stretcher, and when Jess was put into a wheelchair and wheeled forward by a medic the agent explained they were taking her somewhere she can wash and that she would be given clean clothes. Jess didn't know how long it's been since she took a shower.

It took her long to get herself clean, as she had to shower sitting down (she still couldn't stand) and she ached pretty much all over. When she was finally done and crawled out of the shower she found a white towel and clothes that turned out to be a blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She was alarmed to discover how much weight she'd lost, but tried not to think much about it.

When she was dressed she climbed back onto the wheelchair and knocked on the door, and two medics took her to a horribly white room that reeked of disinfection. The medics were very quiet and professional, and no one tried talking to her, which she didn't mind and was actually a bit grateful for, but she felt awkward nonetheless. She was unsure of what she was supposed to do or whether or not she was expected to speak while the medics took good looks at her burns making her incredibly uncomfortable and placed some unfamiliar, cool gel on them. Then they left her with an order not to move, and Jess thought she had no intention whatsoever to move and that the gel felt like heaven spilled over her feet. They must have been gone for only about fifteen minutes, yet still somehow when they returned most of her burns were completely gone. Her feet and some areas on her arms still hurt, but remarkably less, and it was pain she could handle. She wondered if she could have handled that amount of pain before the Incident. Apart from that there wasn't really anything to be done. The burns hurt, but they were superficial and not dangerous, and Lawrence only ever burned her, and when he hit her he made sure not to do it too hard so that there's no permanent damage. She tried not to think about that at the moment.

Jess was given socks and a pair of basic, comfortable sneakers, and another agent walked into the room. _He's different_, thought Jess when she saw him. Maybe it was his smile or something in his eyes, she couldn't tell, but he was much warmer than any agent or medic she's encountered so far, not counting the Avengers. She wasn't sure whether the Avengers counted as agents or not.

"Miss Cory," said the agent, "I'm Agent Coulson. Please come with me."

She didn't say anything as she followed the stranger across more corridors than she could be bothered to count (she counted. They passed eight), her feet protesting weakly and half-heartedly at each impact with the floor, and eventually into what looked like a conference room with a long glass table, twenty black revolving chairs, several green plants in pots and a massive black screen covering one of the white walls. The shade of the walls seemed much less intimidating and blinding than the walls in the medical room, she noted. It must've been a subtler white, or maybe just the general air of the room.

"Sit down," told her Agent Coulson in a kind yet not patronizing tone she found easy to trust. She obeyed, sitting in the closest black chair. He remained standing.

"Do you want me to tell you about my father?" asked Jess in a small voice, trying not to let the idea scare her, knowing full well it was a hopeless battle.

"Not yet," said Coulson, his smile unwavering. "I'm afraid you're going to have to come back in a week for an official questioning, though."

Jess tried suppressing the relief. She probably would be able to go through a questioning in a week, or at least go through it with more grace than she would have had she been forced to do so now.

"In the meantime we have arranged somewhere for you to stay."

"Who's 'we'?" asked Jess. "I mean, I've been dragged around this place for hours and I don't even know where I am."

"Don't worry," Coulson assured her. "We're the good guys, Miss Cory."

She gently laid a finger on the crayon in her pocket, willing herself to leave it there. "That's not good enough," she mumbled through gritted teeth. "I need to know who you are."

She could sense Coulson's hesitation in his pause before he made his decision. "This is one of the headquarters of an organization called SHIELD," he said. "That's Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division. We were behind the Avengers Initiative."

Jess was quiet for several moments before saying, "The initials were picked before the words they stand for, weren't they?"

"Well, the organization started back in the 40's, Miss Cory. I wouldn't know."

"You don't have to keep calling me that. I'm fifteen. It's just Jess." Then she remembered what Coulson told her before she got distracted. "You said I'm staying somewhere?"

"Yes, I have. Apparently you'll be staying at the Avengers Tower for the next week. Tony Stark has offered one of his rooms."

"_Tony Stark_?" repeated Jess, frowning. "Why?"

"I wasn't told, but I wouldn't worry – he's prone to random acts of kindness once in a while."

Jess tried getting her head around it. _The Avengers Tower_, thought Jess. _Why would Tony Stark offer to house me? Perhaps he took pity on me after seeing me in the cell. Maybe he thinks my mental condition is worse than it is. Maybe he's right and I've gone completely mad without realizing._ "You know him, don't you?" Jess asked Coulson carefully. "What's he like?"

"Well, I can say with reasonable confidence you're more mature than him," said Coulson thoughtfully. "Apart from that mostly the same as the media makes him. He'll treat you well. There's a car waiting, if you're ready."

"Okay," mumbled Jess. Looking down, she realized she's been playing with her crayon again. She wondered when she took it out of her pocket and tried not to let the realization she didn't know paralyze her.

* * *

To be completely and perfectly honest, Tony wasn't entirely sure why he had offered the Avengers Tower as a temporary residence for Jess. He wanted to say it was to please Pepper, but he had a scary sort of feeling it had something to do with the kid's cell. Obviously it had something to do with the fact she even _had_ a cell. That was what made him consider the idea in the first place, that and her mental and abusive father. But during the roughly five seconds in which he thought of it he was pretty sure it was when he remembered the writing that he has made his final decision. At the moment he decided it was best not to think about it until the next time he was drunk.

"Miss Cory is in the lobby, sir," informed him JARVIS. "Should I let her up?"

"Yeah," confirmed Tony. "You know what? Just tell her to get down here. Give her directions," he added as an afterthought.

Incidentally, _down here_ was his workshop. Well, one of them. He had plenty in the Tower, but this one was his favorite due to its convenient proximity to the bar. For a moment he wondered about the likelihood of Jess having an unfortunate history with workshops. The odds were slim enough to risk, he decided.

It took her about five minutes to appear at the glass door of the workshop, looking hesitant and intimidated by the unfamiliar surroundings. She looked significantly better than she did just several hours ago. Her hair was clean and fell in gentle, subtle brown curls, and though there were still a few burns and yellow bruises on her arms, they were mostly gone. She was still alarmingly thin, but her general aura was much healthier. She was biting her lip nervously and had both her hands on each side of the doorway. He decided to break the ice for her.

"Hey, come in," he said looking up from his work. He didn't bother faking a smile. He never bothered much with fake smiles unless they had a purpose, and he strongly doubted Jess wanted him to fake one at all. "Walking again?" he asked casually as she walked in hesitantly.

"Yeah," she answered, looking down at her feet. "They, uh… they put some sort of gel on them. I don't think it was made for civilians; unless I missed some _huge_ medical advancement. I mean, this stuff… most of my burns were gone in about fifteen minutes."

"Yeah, those guys know what they're doing," agreed Tony. He pushed one of the revolving chairs next to him in her direction. "Sit," he ordered. She obeyed. "Are you into robotics, Jess?" asked Tony nonchalantly, going back to his work.

"Er, not really," admitted Jess, only slightly surprised by his question. "I don't have much experience with it, though."

"How about science?"

"I was really bad at it at school," she replied. "I just didn't get it. I'm not really an exact sciences person," she added.

"I bet you just weren't properly introduced to exact sciences," said Tony, not looking up from his work. "Do you go by Jess or Jessica?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly.

"Jess," she answered. Quickly.

Tony chuckled. "Yeah? Is that disgust in your voice?"

"Jessica is horrible," said Jess definitively. "I mean, it's not necessarily horrible on its own accord, it's just horrible in reference to me. It's just one of those names that either fit you perfectly or are the worst thing that can happen to you unless you tinker with them a little."

"I see what you mean. Jessica is awful on you." He took a sip of his coffee and rolled away from the desk to look at his work.

"You're building another suit?" asked Jess, gazing at the inner skeleton of a metal arm.

"Yep."

"How many have you already got?" she asked. She sounded genuinely interested. "You've had four or five when I still had access to the internet. Which Mark is this one?"

"40," said Tony, mentally storing away what she said and promising himself to analyze the time frame later.

"Why do you need so many?"

"Well, one never knows when one might need forty Iron Man suits," mused Tony. "Besides, they're really fun to build."

"Are they all the same, though?"

"Never!" scoffed Tony, pretending to be offended.

Jess grinned. "Okay, well, how are they different?"

"Well, these can operate on their own," explained Tony. "I can still use them as suits, but they don't depend on me. And they all have different special abilities. And different names, that's very important."

"So basically you're making an army of Iron Men?" concluded Jess.

"Basically."

"That's intensely cool," she told him sincerely.

"Finally, someone who appreciates my brilliance," said Tony. "I need more like you. Are you for hire?"

Jess chuckled. "Oh, sure, go ahead and hire a fifteen year old. See what the press thinks about that."

Tony shrugged. "I did worse things than that."

"Yeah. I know. You did most of them publicly."

Tony rolled back forwards, leaned his elbow on the desk and gave her a serious look. "That's rude," he declared. "You're being rude."

"And I'm good at it, too."

"You cheeky little- that's it. I changed my mind. I'm not hiring you, I don't want you."

Jess laughed and tried not to wonder how long it's been since she last did.

"Am I interrupting?" asked a feminine voice from the doorway, her words mixing with the sound of heels on tiles.

"Not at all," said Tony, smiling up at Pepper, noticing Jess stopped smiling and was back in her previous tense, hesitant posture. He made a mental note about Jess's reaction to strangers and figured he should make sure she was exposed to as little of those the next week as he could.

"Hi, I'm Pepper Potts, but just call me Pepper," Pepper introduced herself to their guest, holding up a hand, smiling from ear to ear.

"Jess Cory," murmured Jess, shaking her hand. "Hi."

"I just wanted us to properly meet, so I'll be right out," explained Pepper. "If you need anything, anything at all, just ask JARVIS, he'll tell you where to find me."

"Sure, thanks," said Jess, smiling back at her.

"Great. Then I'll be off, and you –" she gestured at Tony – "can get right back to whatever you were doing."

Jess thought the clicking of her heels against the floor was a much more calming sound than they were a minute earlier. Probably because Pepper had the air of a comforting person about her, she decided.

"Mr. Stark –" Jess began.

"Tony," Tony interrupted. "I don't call you Jessica; you don't call me Mr. Stark."

"Alright, so, Tony," she started again, "why am I here?" she ran her fingers through her hair. "Not that I'm not grateful, I really am, but… why?"

And when Tony looked right into her eyes, those eyes that had a certain shining to them and a complexity he wasn't accustomed to seeing in teenagers, he knew he couldn't lie his way out of this one. He sighed. "Because of the stuff you wrote in that cell," he told her.

Jess blinked. "I- what does that have to do with anything?"

"I don't know," Tony admitted. "Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's not about that. Maybe I just felt bad for you. Now, I don't know you. I don't know what happened to you, or how long you were in that cell, and I'm not asking. But I am going to ask you this one thing because I don't think anyone else will: what was the word 'Prisoner' about?"

Jess swallowed. Tony looked down at her hands and noticed she was playing with the crayon again, though in a much gentler way. "Nothing," she mumbled. "I just wrote it when he first put me in the cell. I was pretty upset."

Tony knew he should shut up. He really did. "It was written over and over again," he pointed out anyway.

Jess shrugged. "I wrote over it whenever things got really bad," she said in something that was barely more than a whisper, though her voice became gradually more confident as she spoke. "When I felt like I couldn't take it anymore. It doesn't look like it at first, but after a while the cell is… suffocating. He didn't care about what I wrote. He gave me new crayons when I asked. I thought he'd care, I thought it would make him angry, to know that I saw myself as a prisoner, but he _didn't_ care, so that was when I first understood the whole point was to make me a prisoner. Until that I thought the point was to be my dad, because he didn't really get to before. So the first time it was more an attempt of some sort of defiance than anything, but after that it was just a way to take my anger out on something. Namely the wall."

Tony nodded. "And the other stuff? There was quite a lot written there."

"I didn't have much to _do_ in there," explained Jess. "He wouldn't even get me books. So it was that or sleeping or not doing anything at all. Mostly I just sat there, but there were things inside my head I needed to get out and the only way I knew was to write them. Plus there was something familiar about it, you know? I used to write before, too, so it was kind of comforting."

Tony noted that she was unnervingly calm. Maybe that was how she coped, by distancing herself from the situation.

"I, uh…" Jess hesitated, "I have a weird question, and I have a feeling I may be judged for it, but it's actually really important, to me at least."

"Shoot," Tony told her.

"It's just, I've been, er, away, for a while, and I know I missed some stuff, and I know I should be asking about other stuff right now, but… do you by any chance follow Doctor Who?" There was a small embarrassed smile on her lips.

Tony just laughed.

He probably laughed longer than was considered tactful.

Jess's smile went from embarrassed to slightly exasperated. "I probably should have made you promise not to laugh first," she decided.

"Jess, I'd still have laughed," Tony told her honestly between laughs.

"Fine."

"Alright, alright, I'm sorry," Tony forced himself to stop laughing, though he still found it difficult to keep a straight face. "I'll have to say that no, I don't."

"Well, it's your loss, okay?" Jess grumbled. "Is there anywhere I can catch up on it? I just need something that connects to the internet."

"Yeah, yeah, uh… JARVIS, help Jess get somewhere she can watch Doctor Who, apparently that's what she missed most about the outside world. Oh, you know what? Just take her to one of the spare bedrooms so that she can settle, that makes much more sense."

"As you wish, Sir," said the AI.

"He'll tell you where to turn and what not," Tony told Jess. "And if you need anything, just ask him, he'll either answer or tell you where you can find, er, someone."

"Sure, I'll ask the robot that runs your freaking Tower," muttered Jess, getting up from the chair and walking away. "Just speak up and ask the air and the ceiling will reply, why not. Nothing unusual here." Behind her, she heard Tony start laughing again, presumably still over her question. "Shut _up_."

"I wouldn't get my hopes up," Tony called after her. In truth, despite how funny he found it, there was something serious about her wondering about a TV show. He had a feeling it meant she was going to be okay. There was no denying she's been through a lot, but Tony suspected it wasn't more than she was capable of handling. And no matter how he looked at it, that was an undeniably good thing. He just hoped he wasn't wrong.

* * *

Jess was in one of the spare bedrooms for hours. Tony made sure each of the bedrooms had a computer and a television, resulting in a large number of such in the Tower, so he didn't figure Jess would have any trouble in that specific field. He also figured having access to the internet would be good for her and allow her to see what she has missed, maybe even get back in touch with certain people. Unfortunately, that's wasn't all he has figured out.

The time frame. Jess said that before whatever happened has happened, she was aware of four or five suits. It had Tony seriously alarmed until he realized what she said probably didn't actually mean _you had four or five suits _and that a more accurate way to put it would have been _when the media and public thought you had four or five suits_, which although was still very bad, at least made some sort of sick and backwards sense, which was right about everything he dared hope for. Still, it was worse than he first assumed.

But there was something about the girl he couldn't explain. Not the type of thing Fury would be interested in, at least not officially, but this something made him believe she wasn't hopeless. He didn't know much about psychology, and most of what he did know was due to unfortunate firsthand experience, but the way she talked and acted in the workshop… for a minute he'd almost forgotten how broken she looked earlier. Still, he didn't try fooling himself into thinking it was going to be easy for her. Judging by her previous state, he doubted there was anyone to help her pick up the shattered remains of her life. He decided not to think about Jess's mother or where she might be.

Instead, he focused on the arm for Mark 40.

It didn't take long for everything else to feel distant and not-his. The accurate, complicated mechanics of the arm were his whole world, for now. His favorite part of working on the suits was always what it did to his brain; it calmed him down, made him forget his problems for a little while. Of course, it didn't make his problems disappear altogether, but when he couldn't do anything to solve said problems, working was the next best thing. As his mind sunk deeper and deeper into working, it was as if everything else was put behind a window and Tony was sealed off from the rest of the world.

Well, almost.

"Tony?" rang Pepper's voice.

"Yeah?" he called, distracted.

"We're thinking takeout tonight," she informed him. "Pizza?"

"Yeah, sure," agreed Tony. Then the meaning of her words sunk in. "Wait, takeout? What time is it?"

"Uh…" she paused to glance at her watch. "Eight thirty."

Tony stopped working and tried to remember when he started. Three? Four? "How's Jess doing?"

"She was in her bedroom for a few hours, but she's out now. She was with the rest of the team when I last saw her."

Tony nodded. "Good."

"Tony…" Pepper walked closer to him, making him look up at her from his chair. "What's this about?"

"What do you mean?" asked Tony innocently.

She glared at him. "You know what I mean. Why is Jess here? I mean, you know I'm entirely on board with it. I just want to know what you're thinking."

"I'm thinking…" Tony sighed, trying to find the right words. "I'm thinking this girl's been through hell, and I just… I don't know, I wanted to help. I don't know where Fury was gonna send her, but I know for a fact she'd be safe here, and she'd be with people I trust, people who would be good for her."

Pepper made a small smile. "Well, I think that's wonderful," she told him. Tony smiled back at her as she leaned in and pressed her lips to his. "You coming?"

"Yeah, in a sec. Let me just finish this up, I'm nearly done with this arm."

"Alright."

To the sound of her footsteps, Tony wondered just what he's done in his life to deserve Pepper Potts.

* * *

During the hours she spent in her temporary bedroom, Jess has learned several things:

A. She's missed an entire season of Doctor Who, and judging by the first two episodes, which she watched on a Stark Industries computer, it was one hell of a season, in her opinion at least.

B. The world hasn't changed much in her absence.

C. She's been gone for ten months.

D. She was presumed dead.

She tried not to dwell on the last two, knowing full well she'll have plenty of time for that, but despite her determined attempts, she found herself thinking about her friends.

She wanted to contact them. Call them, send them an email, anything. But she didn't know if she could. She didn't know how they would take it. She didn't know whether the assumptions of her death were official and whether they believed them, but she did know she couldn't just drop out of the skies and expect things to just get right back on track from where they left off. Even if they believed she was alive, she's been missing for ten months. They must have been at least beginning to give up hope by now. Then she thought about everything she's put them through and how hard it must have been for them, and knew she'd start crying unless she stopped thinking about it.

But her mind had a limited supply of distractions. She figured Tony wouldn't mind her taking an innocent stroll in the Tower, and JARVIS would probably tell her if she was about to unknowingly enter somewhere she wasn't supposed to go. She might even find some books.

However, as often seemed to be the case, the universe had other ideas in store.

Jess knew the Avengers all lived in the Avengers Tower. That happened before the Incident, and anyway the name did imply so. But she still didn't expect to meet any of them for reasons she couldn't really understand.

"Jess?"

Jess whirled around and her eyes locked with Steve's. Concern was written all over his face. "Hi," she blurted.

"You okay?" he asked, taking a few steps in her direction. "When did you get here?"

"Um, a few hours ago." She scratched her head nervously. "I was just online catching up. You know, checking what I missed, that sort of stuff."

"Been there," said the super soldier with a nod. "Found anything important?"

"Not really, no," she lied. "Nothing huge."

"Well, that's good, I guess," Steve said so kindly she felt like crying.

_It really could have been nice_, thought Jess mournfully. "Thank you for earlier, by the way," she said. "For getting me out and for stopping my dad, it's… I probably would've stayed there for much longer if it wasn't for you guys, so…"

"It's no problem," said Steve. "It's practically our day job." He paused. "Well, it really is our day job, more or less."

Jess smiled. "Still," she said. "Firemen still get thanked for saving people even though it's their job. Same goes for superheroes, I guess."

Steve chuckled. "I was just heading down to the living room," he told her. "The others should be there, too. Wanna join me?"

Jess wanted to say no. She couldn't help but trust each and every one of the Avengers, but she was scared, though she wasn't sure why. _Ten months ago I'd never have admitted to being scared, not even to myself_, thought Jess. But plenty changed, and she was too familiar with fear to keep pretending it was a sign of weakness.

Jess wanted to say no, and she was about to, until she caught the look in Steve's eyes. He was smiling, and his eyes had a hopeful glint in them. It didn't help that they were the most annoyingly adorable shade of blue either.

"Sure," she found herself saying, and Steve's smile widened and she followed him to the living room.

* * *

Jess was genuinely shocked at how easy it was for her to communicate. She was quiet and hesitant at first, but Thor's booming laughter had a way of forcing people to socialize. And despite everything, she enjoyed it more than she's enjoyed anything in months, and in an hour she laughed more than she has the whole time she spent captive. One thing Jess will never be able to forget, the one thing she will never find easy to believe, was just how quickly the Avengers accepted her and let her become involved in their lives for no reason at all.

Pepper and Tony walked in and out of the room, but Jess could hardly keep track. She didn't notice, but she hasn't reached for the crayon once during the time she spent just chatting and joking with seven superheroes (no one would ever convince her that Pepper's ability to be almost overwhelmingly kind to her didn't make her a superhero).

The following days, when Jess would try to remember what they talked about, she would discover it difficult. But she would remember the way the Avengers made her feel.

Safe.


	2. An Absolute Mess

**A/N: First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has read the story so far. Special thanks go to those who followed, favorited and/or reviewed.**

**I took myself by surprise with this fic. I had the idea for a while now, but I didn't think I was going to write it, and apparently I did. I have a general plan for it and it's quite detailed, but writing this chapter it became painfully clear that my plan lacks details. So if you have any ideas or requests for things you would like to see in this fic, don't hesitate to say so. I would be grateful for any idea even if I don't end up using it.**

**Business and gratitude aside, I humbly present today's chapter!**

_"You son of a bitch! You goddamn son of a bitch!"_

_"Mommy wants me to go. Do you want me to go, too?"_

_"Get away from her! Get away from her right now!"_

_"Dad, what are you doing here?"_

_"Dad, stop!"_

_"Where is he, what have you done with him?"_

_"No, please, please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, just let me out of here, please!"_

_"Idiot! You goddamn idiot! You're so STUPID, Jessica!"_

_"Just leave me alone!"_

Jess woke up crying. She was used to the nightmares, but for some reason this one felt worse than those she had when she was with Lawrence. Maybe it was because usually the nightmares weren't much different from real life, but now there was a shocking contrast between the two.

In real life, she was sitting up in an expensive looking queen bed in a spare bedroom in the Avengers Tower, crying.

In her nightmares, everything used to be real, too. She stopped having nightmares about imaginary fears when she met real horrors. Now she just dreamed memories, memories she wanted to keep well-hidden in parts of her brain too deep to be reached.

When Jess woke up, even though she knew she was safe and that her father could no longer harm her, she still felt the taste of fear in every fiber of her existence, bitter and disgusting. It made her feel sick, and it wasn't just the fear. The fact that the fear had to be there in the first place was just as bad. She was telling the truth the first time she talked to Steve: she knew _exactly_ how shitty her situation was. She was very well aware that she was going to have a tough time adjusting to normal life now that she was out of the monster's claws. She just really didn't want to.

_It's because I'm naturally lazy and I don't want to have to work for anything_, thought Jess in an attempt to cling onto her sense of humor. But it was all but hopeless. Humor and sarcasm were excellent for self defense mechanisms, but at three in the morning it was a bit difficult extracting the funny bits from difficult situations.

And as she sat there in the dark, all the horrors she managed not to think of during the day came flooding her brain as she knew all along would happen eventually. The memories she refused to think of during the day made her want to scream, and nearly worse were the thoughts and worries her own mind came up with. Jess had no idea what was going to happen to her after the questioning at SHIELD, and that scared the life out of her. She didn't know how her friends were going to find out she was alive, and she knew she made them suffer and the guilt was overwhelming. She didn't want to think about any of that before, and she didn't want to now. All she wanted was a distraction. She just needed to stop crying first, which was less easy than she hoped.

_You're safe now_, she thought fiercely. _You're safe, you're safe, you're safe…_ She's lost track of how many times that thought desperately repeated itself in her head, but eventually it seemed to do the trick, or maybe it was just the time passing. "JARVIS?" she asked hesitantly after several minutes, her voice frustratingly weak and raw and pathetic. She stopped crying, but her breathing wasn't quite right yet. She didn't think she could wait much longer, though.

"Yes, Miss Cory?" replied the disembodied voice instantly from somewhere in the ceiling, seemingly oblivious to her distress.

"Is there anywhere I can find books?"

* * *

It was Bruce who found her, curled up on a sofa in the library with a copy of _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ at five thirty in the morning.

"Jess?"

She jumped, startled by his voice, and her head turned to him so fast he thought it must have hurt her neck. "Oh, hey, Bruce," she said when she properly processed it was him.

"Morning," he said with a sheepish smile. "Sorry I scared you."

"It's morning?" asked Jess with a confused frown.

"Sort of. I mean, it's five thirty."

"Oh," said Jess in a tone of surprise. "Huh. Why are you up at five thirty in the morning, anyway?"

"It's a yoga thing," explained Bruce. "I've got a whole program of when I'm supposed to wake up and go to sleep. It helps me stay calm." Jess scooted over on the couch and made room for him, and Bruce sat down tentatively. "What about you?"

"Um…" Jess hesitated. "I just got up in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep, so I asked JARVIS where Tony kept his books. You don't think he'd mind, do you?"

"He won't," Bruce assured her. "I am wondering why he has a Harry Potter book, though."

"He's got the whole series," reported Jess with a smile. "I checked."

"Right," said Bruce with a nod. "So, what you're trying to tell me is that you're a Potter nerd?"

"Yes," answered Jess immediately. "Dude, I'm _the_ Potter nerd." She sighed. "God, I missed those books. I could really use them in the… well, _there_."

"Why?"

"Because Harry Potter is the ultimate comfort book," she said simply.

"Which one?"

"Any of them. Seriously, when the zombie apocalypse starts and everyone I know is either infected or dead and there is no hope for anything, while the other survivors look for stuff like food and tampons I'll just fight zombies in a Barnes & Noble to get to the right aisle."

Bruce chuckled. "Well, that's now two people in the Tower who have plans for what to do during the upcoming zombie apocalypse."

Jess grinned. "Seriously? Who else?"

"Clint once spent twenty five minutes explaining me with exact details how he's going to save the world someday soon, except I think he came up with it on the spot. He was drunk."

Jess laughed.

"Yeah, I think it involved stealing _several_ scooters."

"I think I want to hear the whole twenty five minutes," Jess decided.

"I'm pretty sure Clint doesn't remember ever telling it," said Bruce. "He was pretty drunk. I mean, you don't want to ever get this drunk." He paused. "Well, actually, you're fifteen, so you don't want to get drunk at all."

Jess snorted. "Don't get drunk, kids," she joked.

Bruce smiled. "Really, though, don't," he said, just in case.

"Oh, please," said Jess. "The only reason I'd ever get drunk at all would probably be peer pressure, and you need a social life to be exposed to peer pressure. And anyway, I'm too smart to get drunk at this age." She added with a sigh, burying her nose back in her book.

"How many times have you read that already?" asked Bruce.

Jess shrugged. "A bunch. I stopped counting around sixth grade."

Shaking his head, Bruce decided he had better leave her be with her comfort book. He didn't say anything about the darkness beneath and inside her eyes.

* * *

By the time Jess put the book back onto its shelf it was nine in the morning, and the pit the nightmare left in her stomach was manageable. She still felt it and it still hurt if she thought too much about it, but it wasn't too much for her to handle. She's dealt with worse things.

She wandered around the Tower for a bit, wondering if she could find something to eat. That was another thing she's noticed – she found she didn't need as much food as she needed before the Incident. Her body must have gotten used to not eating much, she figured. It annoyed her, and she wasn't sure why. By all means she wasn't supposed to care about that. Other girls might have even enjoyed it. But she did care, and she didn't like it, and she thought it might have related directly to the little bit of independence and pride left in her, that part of her that didn't want to be in any way effected by the last ten months of her life, the part of her that knew with a bitter certainty that it lost but didn't really want to accept it.

It was the noise that drew her closer. She didn't usually like noise. Sometimes she went as far as hating it. But after six hours on her own (except for the few minutes with Bruce), there was something almost magical about it. It felt like life. Life was something she's missed terribly.

What she saw when she walked into the dining room (which was conveniently right next to the kitchen) was absolutely ridiculous.

When people said _the Avengers_ they usually said it with awe, appreciation and the occasional deeply impressed curse word. When it was made public (or rather, leaked to the press) that the Avengers were all taking residence in the building formerly known as the Stark Tower, most people, particularly grown-ups, immediately assumed they were going to be extremely professional and serious with each other and that considering the size of the place they would be almost completely separated when they weren't working. Naturally, some people disagreed and came up with the most hilarious scenarios, which Jess always found amusing, but she found the more popular idea likelier and thought the grown-ups, as boring as they were about it, were probably right.

Now she knew with a calm kind of certainty just how wrong she was.

Nothing said "Your life is a fucking mess" like a group of superheroes eating breakfast together, earning exasperated glances from Pepper and Natasha.

_Nothing_.

Because Anthony freaking Stark was sitting there eating some colorful kind of cereal, like those she never got near even when she was little because they were practically poison, and Bruce's pancakes were drowned in chocolate, and the God of Lightning was eating _pop tarts_. Clint had gotten blueberry muffin crumbs all over the table and there was something just a little bit spectacular about seeing Captain America's bed hair, which was, by the way, completely fantastic.

"Jess!" Pepper called with a wide smile when she noticed her, causing the heads of everyone else to turn her way. "Come join us. Hungry?"

Jess smiled nervously. "Yeah," she murmured, sitting in a chair Tony pushed her way.

"Well, you can help yourself to whatever you want," said Pepper. "God knows the boys are eating enough as it is."

Tony made a whining sound while Steve smiled at her joke. There was something about that simple and beautiful dynamic that made her almost forget where she was, and why. Just a simple jest revealed how the Avengers really were like a kind of a family, even if it was a very dysfunctional one. _Still more functional than mine_, thought Jess, but it wasn't a bitter thought. It was just her own brand of dark humor, which she's had since she learned to use sarcasm (which was fairly early), found again at last.

"Did you sleep okay?" asked Pepper casually, spreading butter over her toast, as Jess loaded a pancake onto her plate.

"Uh-huh," said Jess in a noncommittal sort of way, deliberately avoiding looking at Bruce. She could feel his eyes on her, just for a moment, but he didn't say anything, for which she was grateful. However, she forgot about Bruce entirely when she bit into the pancake. Last night's pizza was a complete shock and had such a vivid taste to it Jess had wondered if she was going to burst into tears. It was a different kind of shock now. Pizza was pizza. Pancakes were _sweet_.

"Holy shit, who made those?" she asked.

"I did," said Clint, raising his hand.

"Well, they're amazing," Jess told him sincerely.

Clint leaned back in his chair and gave a not-so-humble shrug. "I like anyone who likes my pancakes," he said nonchalantly, and Jess grinned. She poured herself a glass of orange juice as well, and it tasted nothing like oranges in that unhealthy industrial way she missed so much.

And then Tony dropped the _real_ bomb.

"Coffee, anyone?"

"Oh my god, yes," Jess blurted out without even having to think about it.

"Cream? Sugar?"

"Just cream, thanks," she said with a smile, and Tony cocked an eyebrow.

"No sugar? Really?" he asked. "Aren't you too young for that?"

"I liked sugarless coffee since I was twelve," Jess countered.

"And that was, what, last month?"

"Lucky for you, no," said Jess. "Trust me, you don't want to have met twelve year old me."

Tony stopped everything he was doing and looked her in the eyes. "No."

"Yes," she said with an amount of embarrassment to her tone.

"Jessica Cory, tell me you did not have a seventh grade emo phase."

"I did, spectacularly so," she admitted. "And we've been through this, it's Jess."

Tony waved her off absent-mindedly and handed her a steaming mug of fresh, beautiful coffee. The first sip stung her tongue, but the warm, rich taste seemed to fill her body and mind alike and her smile turned into a grin.

And that was something. Because even if she woke up crying and read comfort books for six hours straight, things like the seventh grade emo phase still made her cringe and a good coffee still made things better.

It was when comfort books stopped being comforting, and when she stopped wanting to punch her twelve year old self, and when coffee stopped making a difference, Jess decided, that she would have to start really worrying.

* * *

Jess strolled around the Tower aimlessly. Her feet were still a little sore, but she could hardly feel the burns by now. A quick inspection of her arms in the bathroom mirror earlier showed there would probably be some scarring, but they weren't too bad, all things considered. They weren't even obvious enough for her to avoid exposing her arms. But her book was finished (too quickly in her opinion) and she didn't want to go on the internet. There was nothing there for her except spoilers for stuff she's missed and a lot of guilt, even if things weren't her fault. She still had a significant number of TV shows to catch up on, which normally would have been a priority, but she couldn't be bothered to watch anything. She was far too restless. She nearly grabbed her crayon again before remembering she didn't want to, so she took to walking around instead.

Eventually she found a room that caught her eye.

It was a music room, and it was very well-equipped. A piano, a set of drums and several different types of guitars were only a few of the instruments in it. "Hey, JARVIS?" she called out. "Who plays these?"

"Mr. Stark plays the piano on occasion," JARVIS told her. "The rest of the instruments are not generally used."

"Huh," she muttered. If that was true, she didn't suppose anyone would mind her trying to play for a little. It's been a long time since she last did, but she didn't think she forgot. Hesitantly, she grabbed a black electric guitar from a stand, plugged it in and sat on a red stool just next to the stand. She glanced at the door. She closed it when she walked inside, but she wasn't sure whether or not the room was soundproof. She didn't know if she cared about anyone hearing, but she wanted to avoid it in case she did. However, it looked like there wasn't much to be done about it.

Jess was never magnificently talented with a guitar or with music in general. She wasn't horrible, but she wasn't good, either. It was the same with her singing; her voice wasn't painful to hear, just like it wasn't extraordinarily pleasant.

She didn't sing now. She didn't want anyone to come in while she was, and she had a vague feeling that after going so long without singing she would sound similar to a mating owl. She played _The House of the Rising Sun_, not because it was a favorite (it wasn't really her type), but just because it was a fun piece to play, and not particularly difficult. Plus she couldn't think of anything else she remembered by heart at the moment.

And at some point as she strummed, she stopped thinking about what she was doing. She stopped thinking about her dream and about the Incident and about what followed. She just stopped thinking and started _feeling_.

And for once, she didn't feel the bad.

She felt the good. She felt the true meaning of her father getting locked up and taken away from her. She felt the true meaning of the Avengers trusting her not to be evil like Lawrence. She felt that she was free, for the first time in far too long.

She stopped playing before she was finished. Before she really knew what she was doing, she put the guitar back onto its stand, left the music room and took the elevator back to her bedroom. She found a blank notebook and a pen in one of the drawers. She paused for a moment, and then shoved her crayon into the drawer before shutting it. She opened the notebook, clicked the pen and _wrote_.

She wrote a song, which was odd as she hardly ever wrote songs. In fact the only times she did were when she was working on a project with her best friend, Amy, or when the creative writing club back at school required it. She had almost forgotten what writing on paper felt like; she has grown so accustomed to the crayons on the walls, that were clumsy and difficult and everything but this. She wrote of what she went through, except not really, in a very vague way – vague enough to allow the reader to adjust the meaning of the song so that it fits to their own personal problems, something she considered to be of utmost importance with nearly everything she wrote. She barely paused to think, until her wrist hurt too much for her to continue.

And then she stopped. The song wasn't an especially good one, but that didn't matter. An idea settled in her brain, growing and evolving until it was so real she could almost touch it. She flipped through the notebook's pages until she hit the last one. And on that last page she wrote an untitled list:

_Steve: "He's alive. But he's unconscious. We're going to take him in."_

_Tony: "Hey, come in. Walking again?"_

_Bruce: "Are you alright?"_

_Natasha: "What's your name?"_

_Thor: "You look well. Would you like to sit with us?"_

_Clint: "I didn't know you arrived, how are you doing?"_

_Pepper: "Hi, I'm Pepper Potts, but just call me Pepper."_

_Coulson: "Miss Cory, I'm Agent Coulson. Please come with me."_

Jess looked down at the list and felt something warm in her chest and she knew she was feeling hope. Under the list, in gently written letters, she added two more words:

_Thank you._

She wasn't sure why she wrote down the first words they've all said to her. She just felt like it needed to be remembered. The people she now trusted were on that list, and she wanted to remember how that trust first came to be.

* * *

Jess thought she might never get used to just how unprofessional things were in the Avengers Tower. The Avengers seemed much more like a family than a team with the way they bickered over domestic things such as "Who the hell ate my Skittles?" and "I swear to god, Clint, if I have to see any more of your dirty laundry around this place I am kicking you out to live on the goddamn street", and something about the dynamics in the Tower made Jess happy, though she wasn't sure who for. One of the things that made it clear for Jess the Avengers were long past being just coworkers was the fact that they had Wednesday movie nights.

They were all spread along sofas and couches in the lounge, bowls of popcorn settled in strategically chosen spots, when Jess found them.

"I don't know if I've been here long enough to ask," she admitted after taking a long look at the Avengers acting like her friends have in slumber parties.

"It's movie night," Natasha informed her. "Wanna join us?"

"Sure," said Jess with a shrug, wondering what the last movie she saw was.

"I vote for American Pie," said Tony.

"Stark, there are children present," Natasha reminded him sternly, and Jess considered confessing to have seen the movie with Amy and Charlie. "Nothing R rated." Tony and Clint both groaned loudly. "Alright, nothing _rightfully_ R rated."

"Men in Black," suggested Steve.

"No thanks," said Bruce. "That's a little bit too much sci-fi for me."

"Dude, your _life_ is sci-fi," said Tony.

"Well, exactly. I know what sci-fi actually looks like now, so anything else looks like a cheap attempt at it. Besides, my life and my movies shouldn't share genres."

"Fair enough," Steve deemed. "Anyone else got any ideas?"

"Jess," said Tony. "What do you wanna watch?"

Jess looked at him, startled. "You're asking me?"

"Is there another Jess here? Yes, I'm asking you. Just no chick flicks please."

Jess pulled a disgusted face. "Ew, of course not. But I really don't think you should let me choose."

"Why, you have that bad a taste?" asked Clint with a teasing smile.

Jess snorted. "No. I have _kickass_ taste. But when I'm forced to make a decision for more than one person I tend to make a really crappy decision."

"Well, we won't hold any effects your kickass movies might have against you," Tony told her. "Now pick a movie."

Jess rolled her eyes. "Er, Zombieland?" she suggested uncertainly.

"What is Zombieland?" asked Thor.

"An awesome movie," Natasha said. "Very kickass, a respectable choice, we're watching it."

And that was how Jess Cory ended up watching Zombieland with Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow, and it was the best Zombieland experience she's ever had (and she had quite a bit). It was a harmless movie, and that was one of the things Jess loved about it. It wasn't very sophisticated, but it didn't make her think about stuff she didn't want to think about in the wrong light and instead made her think about the possibilities of healing and finding the right people with whom to heal. And as she watched the stupidly hilarious comedy, she regretted only staying in the Avengers Tower for five more days.

"Okay, I've got a question," Jess said when the movie was over. "Officially – what is your job, exactly?"

"We're SHIELD agents," said Natasha. "Some of us are, anyway. Tony and Bruce are technically consultants, and Thor…" she paused and turned to glance at Thor. "What _is_ your job?"

Thor scratched his head thoughtfully. Eventually he said slowly and uncertainly, "I… don't know."

"But we all definitely work for SHIELD," said Tony unhelpfully.

Jess shook her head disbelievingly. "You know, people outside this Tower – normal people – they seem to think you're all very professional. Should I start telling them they're wrong or am I missing something?"

"Spread the word," said Tony with a dramatic hand gesture and a shrug.

"Anything else?" asked Steve with a smile.

"Yes, actually," admitted Jess. "This one is gonna be just me being really, really, pathetically excited about the ideas of superheroes –"

"Now there's a word you shouldn't use around Tony," joked Bruce.

"It's true," said Tony indifferently. "You might not have noticed, but apparently my ego is getting big."

Jess smiled. "Oh, really?"

"So they say."

"I see."

"Quit distracting her," Thor told Tony and looked at Jess. "What is it you wish to know?"

She bit her lip and leaned back on the couch. "What was the most ridiculous thing that ever happened on a mission?"

"Oh, man," laughed Clint.

"Individually or as part of the Avengers?" asked Steve.

"Both work," replied Jess. "It sounds like there are some properly hilarious stories in this business."

As it turned out, Jess's assumption was not wrong. She could fill a novel with the stories she heard that night, and that only if she chose the best ones. For all of them it would take at least two long ones. And she didn't think it was a mistake to think such novels would _sell_. She heard stories from New York, from Budapest, from Asgard, from the 40's and from countless other places around the globe. They just didn't seem to end. Eventually they were shooed out of the lounge and ordered to go to bed by Pepper, and even though practically everyone groaned and/or complained, no one really argued with her. Jess had a feeling no one argued with Pepper about little things except maybe Tony.

That night, Jess didn't dream about anything.

It was the best sleep she's had in ten months.

* * *

It was the fourth day since Jess first stepped into the Avengers Tower, and Tony was bored.

Not that he didn't have anything to do. He had quite a lot of work that needed to be completed and he still had his new suit to finish, but he was procrastinating.

"Hey," said Jess, walking inside the workshop. "JARVIS said you called?"

"Yep," confirmed Tony. "You're just in time."

"In time for what?"

"Nothing, I was just bored," said Tony, shrugging. "Were you doing anything important?"

"You caught me in the middle of a very serious session of sitting and staring, actually," said Jess. "It was a very good one."

"Well, sorry for interrupting."

"I don't know if I can ever fully forgive you," sighed Jess.

"Everyone always says that," Tony disregarded her. "Wanna learn mechanics?"

"What, you wanna teach me?" asked Jess, surprised.

"Well, yes."

"Er, okay," murmured Jess.

Tony gave her a dark look. "Don't sound _too_ excited."

"Sorry," she said. "It actually sounds really interesting, and I'd love to, I'm just not a very good student, so I don't know if you're going to like teaching me as much as you think."

"What do you mean 'you're not a good student'?" asked Tony with a frown.

Jess shrugged.

"No, seriously, what did you mean?" Tony persisted, his frown deepening.

"I just wasn't really good at school, that's all," Jess explained. "I'm pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to things I don't enjoy learning."

"Well, this you're gonna enjoy," Tony promised her. "Trust me; I'm better than the teachers at your school."

"I find that easy to believe, seeing as a large portion of my teachers are assholes."

Tony chuckled. "Rude," he pointed out.

"Yeah, maybe a little," agreed Jess with a smirk. "So, mechanics? Though I gotta warn you, I don't know jack."

"Good, that means no one ruined it for you yet."

So Tony still did the work he needed to do, so maybe it didn't count as real procrastination, but Jess was helping him out and it was fun, and if Jess's grins and laughs were anything to go by, she felt the same. It took her a while to really get into it, but the moment things started making sense to her it was like a spark has gotten the flame running in her. It was like she got the rhythm of a song and could now dance to it. And if living was to be compared to dancing all the way, Jess danced fast and mad and unstoppable. Neither Jess nor Tony danced, and when Tony shared his little analogy with her she laughed and said it was ridiculous, but when she stopped laughing there was something about her smile in the moment their eyes met that was so honest and serious, like she understood exactly what he meant. Like she felt amazed that it could be thought of her.

For a moment, Tony wanted to tell her not to, because he couldn't imagine that girl considered as anything but a fast, mad, unstoppable dancer, but he didn't because he was Tony and he didn't do sentimental and anyway they only knew each other for four days and weren't quite there yet.

But he thought that maybe it didn't need saying.

He thought that maybe when Jess understood what he really meant she understood the second part, too.

He thought that she was brilliant enough to.


	3. Burning Memories

**A/N: Okay, I messed up, I know. It's been about a month and a half since my last update, I think, and it's thoroughly my fault. School started, and then I was freaking out, and then I was freaking out some more, and I just didn't write anything for about a month, and I'm so so sorry. I hope this chapter is enough to make it up to you, though.**

The one week SHIELD promised Jess went by far too quickly for her liking.

If Jess had been asked to give proof to why life was incredibly messed up, she wouldn't have had to even think about it, because proof was right there in front of her, staring into her eyes since the moment she left that cell. Life was messed up because before, she was entirely capable of meeting with the same people for months before ever having a proper conversation with them, and sometimes she never got around to learning people's names. She wasn't just capable of it; she was quite good at it, too, and that was how she lived her life and never thought twice about it. It wasn't that she didn't _like_ people, not necessarily; she just never got around to asking. Yet during the past week she has been more socially active with people she didn't know than she was throughout the whole of middle school.

And if she stopped to think about _that_, then things started making even less sense, because she never cared for being overly social. She loved being a loner, and she loved awkwardly sitting in a corner with a book in social events. She didn't have anything against people, not by default and definitely not all of them, she just liked the quiet.

And the reason that made things strange was because once she got over the initial awkwardness and hesitation that came with most first meetings, she didn't even have to think about socializing, she just did. She didn't find herself in need to filter what she said or what she joked about, which was something she only ever got to do around Amy and Charlie, and they thought she was dead.

She really missed Amy and Charlie.

They were another one of the things she didn't want to think about.

Incidentally, they were the one thing she didn't seem to be able to stop thinking about, more than any other crap that was screaming in her head.

And now the week was over and she was back in SHIELD headquarters, wondering if this was the time to tell them she had stage fright so if they could all just stop staring at her like that please and thank you.

They were all back in the room to which Coulson took her right after the defeat of Lawrence – _all of them_. Bruce was nervously toying with a pen in his hands, Clint and Natasha gave her identical looks of stone, Thor and Steve looked just a little bit lost and the look Tony gave her was so raw with an unidentified emotion she found it almost impossible to meet his gaze. While the team and herself were sitting at the long table, Coulson stood by the door, his arms crossed and his expression strictly professional, though Jess thought she saw something of his unmoved demeanor slip momentarily when he saw her. That might have been just her slight tendency to narcissism, though, causing her to imagine things.

There was another man standing at the head of the table, someone named Nick Fury who Natasha has very seriously told Jess not to piss off. He was generally intimidating with his eye patch and his 'I'm in charge' posture, but Jess didn't mind that nearly as much as all the staring.

"Miss Cory," said Fury, his voice deep and serious. "Do you know why you're here?"

"Well, I figured you wanted to know some stuff about my dad," answered Jess. "And maybe, if you guys care about that sort of thing, about the whole cell thing? Things that happened since my dad flipped out?" She looked at Fury with raised eyebrows, waiting for confirmation. "Something like that?"

"If you wouldn't mind," said Fury, not unkindly.

"Well, it has to come out at some point and it's either you or a therapist, so sure, yeah," joked Jess, attempting to lighten up the air. No one smiled. Maybe it was because she was still not looking anyone in the eye. Or maybe she just wasn't very funny.

Fury reached out and clicked a recording device on the table, causing a light on it to go red. He looked at her in a gentle way she didn't expect, as if challenging – no, encouraging her to say something if she minded. She didn't, so he went back to using his diamond hard expression. She had a feeling he was actually just more naturally grumpy than anything else.

"So," she sighed. "Where do you want me to start?"

"We want to know as much as possible of the crimes of Lawrence Cory, both against the general public and yourself," said Fury. "Miss Cory, what do you know of your father's mutation?"

"Not as much as I would've liked," admitted Jess. "Probably not more than you already do. I knew there was some accident before I was born, but not the details."

"Did you ever get the feeling he was deliberately avoiding the subject of his accident?" asked Fury.

"I don't think so. I mean, he didn't talk about it, but there was no real reason. It just didn't seem important at the time, when it looked like there were no lasting effects."

"Miss Cory, do you know how long you were held hostage?" asked Fury.

Jess didn't tell any of the Avengers how long it's been. She kind of wanted not to, but she knew this was important, even if she wasn't all that sure why. "Yeah," she said uneasily. "It was, uh, ten months." She was staring at her feet, but from the corner of her eye she could see Tony going tense, Steve fidgeting in his seat, Bruce gripping his chair with anger momentarily. "And it's not Miss Cory," she added quietly as if it mattered. "It's just Jess."

_Just Jess._

Tony straightened up in his chair. "Yeah, this is just not gonna cut it," he informed Fury, who raised an eyebrow at his outburst. Jess looked at Tony curiously. "Director, if you don't mind, I'd like to propose a slightly different questioning technique."

There was something in the stare Tony and Fury shared then that reminded Jess of cats, both tense and ready for a fight, watching each other and waiting for one to make a move. Then she realized she was comparing Tony Stark and Nick Fury to cats and tried to stop thinking about it.

"Fine," said Fury indignantly. "What is your proposal?"

"Jess, can you just tell us everything that's happened?" Tony asked Jess, looking at her with a soft look in his eyes. Jess, who was trying to avoid eye contact at the moment, found herself feeling guilty for it. "You can stop if it gets too much. No one will pressure you into saying anything you're not comfortable with." Tony didn't know if what he was saying was true. He had no idea to which extent SHIELD would go to find out the truth, but as much as he liked hiding it, he trusted Fury, at least to a certain extent, and he didn't think he would deliberately upset Jess.

"Okay," said Jess quietly, feeling the weight of the question deep in her chest, trying to pull her down. She ignored it and cleared her throat, raising her voice slightly (and as much as she could) so that she was heard. She didn't want to have to repeat anything she was about to say.

"He's always been a drunken piece of crap," said Jess. "I didn't know until my mom kicked him out when I was nine. I didn't really get what it meant back then, so for a while there I thought it was just going to be an ordinary divorce and that I could have a normal relationship with him. But he was never really around, so that kind of went down the toilet.

"One night he comes to my mom's house and rings the doorbell." Jess took a deep breath. "I let him in. I didn't understand what was going on until it was too late."

She stopped for a moment, fighting down the choking sensation in her throat. She didn't get to the worst part yet, and she needed to keep it together until she's not in a room full of people. "At first I thought he was drunk," she continued. "Maybe he was, I don't know, but I think it was just his madness. He walked in, barely giving me a second look, and grabbed my mom. Then he shot purple through my mom's throat and she was dead."

She had to stop again. Memories were flooding through her brain and Jess wanted to burn them all until she was nothing but an empty shell rather than a really screwed up teenager.

"What were you doing when he attacked your mother?" asked Natasha gently.

A small, humorless chuckle escaped Jess's lips. It sounded so ridiculously, cruelly perfectly timed for her to ask that now.

"I was covering my little brother's eyes," she said bitterly. "While my mom was being murdered, I held a ten year old boy so that he wouldn't see."

"You have a brother?" asked Thor with raised eyebrows.

"Had."

Jess could feel the tension in the room building up, weighing down at her like a world on her shoulders. She stared at the floor, not wanting to see anyone's face. She didn't want to imagine what they must have looked like, but that was a much more difficult thing to accomplish than just looking away. In her mind she could still see them, and that hurt like hell even though she only knew them for several days.

"When my mom was dead," Jess continued, still determinedly looking down, "and her eyes became empty of everything that was her until she wasn't my mother anymore, he took us. He forced us into a car and he drove to the building in which you found me.

"At first I didn't even know about the cells downstairs. He let us wander around the building as long as we obeyed him, and he fed us more or less regularly, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Not straight away. When I wandered down to the basement and found the cells, he said it was in case we misbehaved, and all I could think about was how small these stupid cells were so I didn't act out and I did all I could to keep my dad calm.

"It was hard. He'd drink to get drunk and then grew a temper, hence the burns. I mostly tried to keep away from him, but sometimes that wasn't an option. Sometimes he'd call me to sit beside him while he drank. I think he considered me a trophy, a proof of his dominance, because I was his daughter and was bound to him. Then pleasing him became almost impossible, because his mind worked on whims, and when they weren't instantly fulfilled he got angry, and Emmett… Emmett was never an easy kid. Not ever. He was hyper, moody, easily bored and naturally cheeky. I guess I couldn't really expect his story to end differently."

Jess took a deep breath, swallowing hard at the lump in her throat and blinking several times, before she continued. "One day Lawrence was in a fury. It wasn't uncommon, but I've never seen him go off like that. Emmett was already bruised and cut and skinny. He was the only one Dad ever hit instead of just burning, and the first one he starved. And he talked back to him, and shouted, and talked about Mom, and cried and _screamed_. And my dad looked at him and he stopped shooting purple fire everywhere. His eyes stopped glowing and he was no longer tense and for a moment I thought that maybe we were going to be fine after all. But that moment was gone and Lawrence took him outside, pushing me away when I tried to stop him. He came back an hour later and Emmett wasn't with him. That was also the day I got put in the cell. I came at him with a knife."

Jess's small hands were clenched into fists, so hard her knuckles were white.

The room was nearly silent for a full minute after that. The deep quiet that threatened to swallow Jess whole was only prevented by the sound of her breathing, forced-calm and shallow. Besides that the only thing she could hear was the noise inside her head, screaming and thumping against her skull.

"After that, things were more or less the same," said Jess, so softly it was barely more than a whisper. "I spent some time in the cell and then you guys showed up."

The large room was suddenly too small for Jess, with all the staring and the talking, and she just wanted to shut her eyes, curl up in her old bed back home and cry. But she didn't have that old bed anymore, and her entire family was either dead or insane.

_Maybe I'm insane, too_, thought Jess grimly. _I was already half crazy when Mom died, and there would be no logical explanation to me being sane right now. Then again, there's no logical explanation to how a life can escalate and become this bad this fast._

"Is there anything else you can remember?" asked Fury. "Anything that might be of importance?"

Jess shook her head, not trusting her voice not to crack if she tried to speak any more.

"Miss Cory, I truly am sorry for having to ask you this, but would you say it was possible that you have inherited any of your father's abilities?"

Jess's head shot up at the question as she stared at Fury with shock. "I- I don't think so," she said, shaking her head. "Why, is that possible?" She felt the all too familiar claws of panic in her throat and chest.

"We're not sure," said Coulson. "We're trying to work it out, but as far as we know there is a possibility for those abilities to be genetic."

Jess blinked and ran a shaky hand through her hair, trying to comprehend the new information without freaking out. Her vision was going blurry around the edges, the room and its residents becoming somehow insignificant in relation to the understanding that Lawrence's torment might be far from over. She wasn't paying attention to her breathing pattern anymore, which turned irregular and just a tad too fast.

"Director, I think we're done here," said Tony sharply, noticing Jess's distress. "If that's alright by you, I think we'll be going back to the Tower now."

"I'm afraid Miss Cory isn't going back to the Tower, Stark," said Fury. His tone was harsh, but he sounded apologetic simultaneously. "She has stayed the week but a permanent residence needs to be arranged. She will stay here until such arrangements are made. Do not argue with me on this, I don't like it any more than you do."

If Jess was calm enough to look at Tony she would have been touched by the angry expression on his face, reflected nearly perfectly on the rest of the team's. However all her concentration was currently being focused on the effort of keeping tears from forming in her eyes, or at the very least stopping them from falling onto her cheeks. She didn't say a word as Agent Coulson gave her an expectant yet sympathetic look, politely asking her to come with him. Jess stood on a pair of shaky legs and followed Coulson into an elevator that was in the room.

Turning her back to the inner wall of the elevator and looking at the Avengers, Jess could see that they were all standing up as well, looking unhappy. Her watery gaze went silently from one team member to the next, and the elevator's doors closed.

Jess wondered if she was ever going to see the Avengers again.

Steve was mostly known to the American public for his strength and military actions, and that was fine with him. Yet with all the focus going to his physical traits, people often forgot that his mind wasn't half bad, either.

Steve Rogers wasn't stupid. He was in fact rather smart.

And as a smart man should, he was piecing things together.

Steve barely waited for the elevator doors to shut before going directly at Fury. "Are you out of your mind?" he snapped at him. "You're gonna experiment on her, aren't you? See if she has her dad's powers? Poke her til she pokes back? She's just a kid!"

"Take it easy, Captain," Fury snapped back, though in a more collected manner. "I never said that."

"No, but you're going to, aren't you? Tell me, did the lab work out what makes her dad tick yet, or are they just gonna do trial and error with her?"

"Calm down, Steve," said Natasha, but she was looking at Fury with an almost accusing look herself.

"What are your plans for Jess?" asked Thor. "Tell us."

Fury sighed. "If you must know, I don't know yet."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" asked Steve. "You're the director, you're almost as high up as it gets!"

"I am not the highest in the chain of command," said Fury calmly. "It's out of my hands, Rogers, the Council will decide what will happen to the kid next, not me."

"The Council?" repeated Tony. "What do they care about Jess?"

"They've taken interest," explained Fury. "I assume it's because if Jess does have her father's powers, that would make her extremely powerful, and therefore a potential threat or ally to SHIELD."

"She's neither of those, she's fifteen," said Bruce angrily, his fingers fidgeting as he fought to control his emotions.

"You can't just lock her up here like she's some sort of criminal and not a victim of one," insisted Steve.

"I am aware of that," said Fury impatiently. "Look, I'm not happy about the situation, but there is nothing I can do."

"Bullshit," said Clint bluntly.

"The questioning is over," said Fury drily. "Your job here is done. Unless there is anything else, I suggest you leave."

And they did, but not without giving Fury a last dirty look each. In the last moment before the door of the room closed, Fury spoke again.

"I can tell you the Council's decision once one has been made," he said, turning away from them. Behind him, he heard the door close, but it didn't worry him. He knew they've heard.

But he wasn't lying. He _really_ wasn't happy with the situation. He didn't trust the Council, and he still remembered New York; the Council's order to blast Manhattan still made him lose sleep at times. He didn't trust the Council with a city, and he didn't trust them with an antagonized teenager.

* * *

The Avengers were called upon again three days later by Fury, who said the Council has made its decision and if they wanted he was willing to discuss it with them. It was much kinder than Fury's usual behavior, and nobody considered not coming. All of them, Pepper included, were concerned about Jess's faith if left in the hands of the cold and emotionally detached Council members. Whatever the decision was, they needed to know.

And so they returned to the conference room for the third time in a week and a half, with Fury standing at the end of the table as he always have.

"What has the Council said?" asked Thor. "Will they let Jess leave?"

Fury eyed Thor for several moments before cautiously replying, choosing his words with care. "Not right away," he said. "They want to see if she has her father's abilities."

"How will they check?" asked Bruce immediately, not feeling overly surprised. "Did they learn anything from Lawrence?"

"They did not," admitted Fury. "It seems it would indeed be trial and error, and that some time may pass before a conclusion is reached."

"How can they do that?" asked Steve angrily. "You people are supposed to be the good guys. Let her go home!"

"Miss Cory doesn't have a home," said Fury. "That was the Council's main argument; there is nowhere for Jess to go back to. If she did, maybe things would have been different."

"Yeah, but she doesn't," said Tony. "And that doesn't give them the right to –"

"They have every right, that's not what I'm saying," snapped Fury. "If Jess had a home, legal guardians, anything like that, the Council would be forced to let her leave and SHIELD would need her consent before running tests. We _are_ the good guys, Captain Rogers. And so are you. The Avengers were created in order to do many things but their first and ultimate purpose is to help and protect the innocents. And that is what you need to do now." He looked at Tony meaningfully. "Do you understand?"

Natasha sat up in her seat, being the first to work out Fury's meaning. Tony stayed absolutely still and didn't look back at Fury, but he understood just fine. Everyone else was still wondering.

"This meeting is over," said Fury. "Consider yourselves dismissed." He walked out of the room, his long black coat nearly touching the floor as he did.

"What did Fury mean?" asked Clint the moment the door closed.

"He meant we can help Jess," said Natasha, staring at Tony.

"Help her? How? He said it himself, the Council said –"

"The Council said Jess stays because she's got nowhere else to go," said Tony.

"Well, exactly, then –"

"Then what if she _did_ have somewhere else to go?" Tony explained. "What if she _had_ a home?"

"Then SHIELD can't touch her without consent," said Bruce quietly. "Are you suggesting…?"

"I'm not suggesting anything," said Tony. "Fury is. But the point stands."

"And the point is that what? We should adopt a teenager?" asked Steve, getting the idea.

"Is that even legally possible?" asked Clint. "I mean, adoption by more than two people?"

"I'm sure strings can be pulled," Natasha reflected uncertainly. "That's not the issue."

"And if that does turn out to be a problem, me and Pepper can do it," said Tony, taking everyone by surprise.

"Tony, are you sure you realize the seriousness of what you're saying?" asked Steve. "I know you enjoyed having Jess around, but that was one week. If we adopt her, if _you_ adopt her… that's a lot of responsibility. Especially Jess. She's going to have a really hard time adjusting. She'd need help."

"You don't think I can help her?"

"Most of the time I'm not sure you can help _yourself_."

"Cut it out, both of you," said Bruce. "We need to think about this, calmly, not argue."

"Fury is right," said Thor. "Jess is our responsibility, has been since we rescued her, and if there is a way for us to help her we have no choice but to take it."

"And it's not like we don't have the resources," Natasha pointed out. "Stark's a billionaire, so that won't be an issue."

"Yeah, but money can't buy everything," argued Steve. "What Jess is going to need now is a family. If we do this…" he took a deep breath. "We would have to be her family. I'm all up for that, but can we do it? Jess needs stability, something she can rely on. That doesn't sound like us to me. Between saving the world twice a week to the amount of crazy our lives add up to, how can we raise a teenage girl?"

"We're only talking about a few years, though," Clint said. "There's not that much raising left, is there? If we go through with this, she'd probably graduate high school before we can blink."

"Maybe, but we can't count on that. And we don't even know how Pepper feels about it. She needs to be a part of this decision, too."

"Look, I get what you're saying, but we might not have time for an hours long debate," said Tony impatiently. "Who knows when they're gonna start testing Jess? And we don't know what they're going to do to her then. We need to decide, and we need to decide fast. There's nothing left to say, let's just vote and get this over with. I say we do it. I think we can."

"I agree," said Thor. "We promised her we'd help her."

"Alright," said Bruce, nodding. "I'm not saying it's gonna be easy, but I think it's manageable."

"Protecting people is our job, right?" Steve thought aloud. "That falls under protecting people. Definitely. Yes. We do it."

Natasha shrugged. "It'd be great to have someone help keeping you guys sane."

"Fair enough," said Tony. "Clint, what do you say?"

Clint smiled. "Well, god knows I like having the kid around. Sure, let's give it a shot."

"So we're actually going through with this?" asked Bruce, just to make sure. "We're actually adopting Jess?"

"That's right, Big Guy," confirmed Tony. "Hell, we're superheroes, we can do this." He looked at them all, his team members, the people he had come to trust. He thought of how lost Jess looked when the elevator closed. He thought about Pepper. "We can do this," he repeated quietly.

* * *

Jess only spent four days in SHIELD custody. Three days while the Council debated, and one more in which she wondered why nobody was cutting her open already.

She wasn't _overly_ bored. She was given a small room with only a grey, hard bed and frustratingly dull cement walls which was basically another cell, but it wasn't that bad. Nobody bothered her except for when they brought her meals, and when she asked she was given books. It wasn't that she had nothing to do. She was feeling a little trapped, but nothing she couldn't handle.

But the not-knowing was hard. She was informed of the Council's decision, and while thinking about strangers prodding her with strange devices made her skin crawl, she couldn't figure out why they weren't starting already. It would make sense for them to want to get to work as soon as possible, before she went crazy like her dad. Keeping her cooped up in that room just didn't add up to anything logical.

Just when she started thinking that she may have to throw a fit if she wanted some answers, answers came.

On the fourth day Agent Coulson stepped into her room with a smile. He spoke politely and asked her how she was doing, which was far more than anyone has said to her in four days, and then asked her to come with him one last time.

Jess wondered why it was always Coulson she followed around. Surely he was too important to be doing this? She considered asking him, but settled on a different question instead.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"The Avengers need to talk to you," said Coulson, and she thought she saw his smile changing a little as he said that. It turned from just polite to something more genuine.

"I thought they're not involved anymore," said Jess, confused. "That's what the guy said, the one who told me what the Council decided."

"They weren't supposed to be," agreed Coulson. "But I think you'll find they have a tendency to stick around a bit longer than expected."

"Like that one time everyone thought Captain America was dead and he turned up seventy years later in an iceberg?"

Coulson chuckled. "That was one of the more dramatic times that happened, yes."

Jess smiled. It was nice to have someone with a sense of humor around again.

They reached that same conference room yet again, and Jess felt that she was getting pretty sick of it, despite it being quite nice. That wasn't the focus of her attention, though. The Avengers were indeed there, all standing rather than sitting, and Fury was nowhere to be seen.

"Heya, Jess," Clint greeted her. "SHIELD treating you alright?"

Jess shrugged with a smile. "Well, I can't complain, I guess. They're being pretty detached, but I don't mind that." She couldn't read their expressions. "So what's up?"

Tony stepped up to explain. "Right, so the Council people made a decision – of which you're aware, yes?"

"Yeah."

"Great. And we thought that they were being pretty big dicks about it."

"_Tony_," warned Steve.

"Whatever, let me get to the point," Tony waved him off. "So Fury told us what the Council said, and we thought, 'well, that's a bit messed up'. And Fury, well, he looks scary but you just know he's really a cuddly teddy bear inside, and he told us that what gives SHIELD the right to violate about every right you've got on your own body is that you're a hobo minor."

Bruce sighed and Natasha rolled her eyes. Jess just raised an eyebrow, feeling slightly amused by the title.

"And this is where we get to the fun part," Tony continued. "We talked to Fury, figured out what strings can be pulled, what the law allows, ect, and it turns out, well, you don't have to be a hobo."

"Sorry, not getting it," said Jess. Then she noticed some papers on the table. "What are these?" she asked, vaguely pointing at the neat pile.

Tony glanced briefly at the rest of the team before locking his gaze with hers. There was something very gentle in his eyes that Jess wasn't accustomed to seeing. "Adoption papers," he said softly. He kept his eyes on her, watching her reaction closely. Jess could feel the others doing the same.

But her coping mechanisms were kicking in and Jess found her brain to be numb. She didn't say anything, just looked at them, silently asking for further explanation.

"Basically, we're all adopting you," said Clint briefly.

"If you want," added Steve.

"SHIELD won't be able to touch you if we do this," said Bruce. "Not without full consent from you and from all of us."

Jess felt too shocked, too touched, to think. "And you're all cool with doing it?" she asked. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm pretty messed up."

"Yeah, well, who isn't?" shrugged Tony.

"We'll have you if you'll have us," said Steve with a smile.

"We'd be happy to have you join our family," said Thor with a wide, hopeful grin.

_Family_.

It's been a while since Jess had that.

"So, what do you say, kid?" asked Natasha, cracking a smile as well. "Interested?"

She didn't need to think about it for a single second more. Jess grinned.

"Yes."


	4. Pause, Rewind, Play

**A/N: Hey guys. I'm more pleased with how soon this chapter is posted than I was with the last one, but I guess it's still not ideal. I promise I'm trying to get these done quicker, but sometimes it's just real difficult to get started. I hope you can understand and that the content of the chapters at least partially make up for it.**

**On another note, I'd like to ask you a favor. I hate to ask, but it would be really super great if you left a review after reading the chapter if you feel comfortable doing so. It's insanely motivating and would really help me get future chapters written faster. Nothing huge, I'd be happy with nearly anything (though I also wouldn't object a long review). Seriously, even if you only have bad things to say, I'd still wanna hear. Thank you in advance if you review, and even if you don't.**

Jess found herself unable to keep track of her life.

She was adopted by the Avengers, something she didn't really understand. She knew she would forever remain grateful to them for it, but she wasn't sure why they took her in, just like that. They most definitely didn't have to. They could let SHIELD take care of her, but they didn't. They went and used loopholes and pulled favors and got important people pissed off. The media was only notified two days earlier, and people were already making theories and even accusations. It wasn't a surprise when a rumor claiming Jess was Tony's illegitimate child arose, considering Tony's well-known playboy reputation in the past, but now both Tony and Pepper were almost constantly bothered with questions about it, despite their refusal to confirm the rumor. They both said that it wasn't as bad as it looked and told Jess not to worry about it, but she couldn't help the guilt.

The press ought to have been grateful. The only piece of Jess's story left unknown was her father. It was, admittedly, a crucial piece, since it was the one that explained Jess's connection to the Avengers, but it was one absolutely nobody in the equation felt comfortable sharing.

So now Jess was no longer considered dead. Which was a good thing, definitely; it was just that Jess had no idea how to reclaim her status as 'alive'.

She only knew the first step.

It was Natasha who went with her to the abandoned playground a few blocks away from her old high-school. Natasha turned out to be at least just as motherly as Pepper, even if she showed it differently and more subtly, with little things like insisting on accompanying her, and sometimes putting her hand on her shoulder with that perfect timing of hers.

Her hand was on her shoulder now, so softly Jess barely even felt it but there nonetheless. "You sure you don't want me to stay?" she asked.

Jess nodded, pulling at her hoodie's sleeves so that they covered her palms. Her hair was pulled in a low ponytail and her breath turned to mist in the cold air.

"Okay," said Natasha. "I'll be right there, just give me a sign if you need me."

Jess wondered why Natasha was acting so protective over her. Then she realized it probably had something to do with her being taken captive by her dad for the better part of a year and felt a bit stupid.

Natasha's hand left her shoulder as she went to sit on a bench the other side of the playground, and Jess was left standing alone, waiting. She hugged herself, more out of nervousness than because of the cold.

It was a few minutes before she saw them.

When she did, it was like somebody turned her life around and took her back to before, and for a second she forgot how long it was since she last saw her best friends.

Then she remembered, and her breath caught in her throat at the sight of Amy and Charlie, looking just like they did the last time she saw them, except maybe taller and more mature. But they were okay. They were healthy and alive, which was more than could be said for Jess's mother and brother.

Jess couldn't remember if she ran toward them, but she must have because the distance between them was gone all of a sudden and she was buried in a hug from the last two people she had left in the world. Her family.

And Jess was crying, though she didn't know when she started, and Amy was crying, and Charlie was crying, and they were all hugging and crying together the way fifteen year old kids never should.

"Fuck," Amy was saying. "Fuck, you never do that again. _Fuck_."

"Is 'fuck' really the first thing you're saying to me after ten months?" Jess asked, joking through the tears.

"Shut up," said Amy forcefully, hugging her tighter than she ever did in all the years they knew each other. "I thought you were dead, I can say whatever I want. Jesus shit, _I thought you were dead._"

Amy and Charlie let go, and Jess let out a shaky laugh. "God, I've missed you."

"We missed you, too," said Charlie. He wiped his eyes, had his hands in his pockets and looked a bit awkward, like he didn't really know what to do with himself, and Jess felt overwhelmed.

"I love you," said Jess. "I love the both of you, okay? And I'm gonna keep loving you for the rest of my life because you're my family. And _god_, just…" a sob broke through her and she hugged Amy again, burying her face in her best friend's shoulder.

"Shit, I love you, too," sobbed Amy. "I love you."

This time it was Jess who let go, and she barely had time to wipe one of her cheeks before Charlie got his own solo hug. "I love you," he muttered. "We thought you were dead, what… what the hell happened, Jess? Where were you?"

They broke apart, and Jess knew she had to tell them. She owed them that.

"It was my dad," she whispered. "He killed Mom and he took us and then he killed Emmett, too."

"Oh my god," whispered Amy. "Jesus, Jess…" Charlie didn't say anything, but judging by the look on his face it was because he didn't know what was the right thing to say. Jess didn't care for a second.

"He went insane," Jess summarized sadly. "Just… full-on, murderous crazy. And it's all screwed up right now. _I'm_ all screwed up right now. Guys, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what my life looks like."

"They said the Avengers adopted you," said Charlie. "It's not… it's not true, is it? I mean, it's… it's mad."

"I know," said Jess. "But it is. They saved me. They got me out. He had me in this cell and they stopped him and got me out."

"Holy shit," breathed Amy. "But why did they adopt you?"

Jess hesitated. She didn't know if she was ready to tell them about her father's powers yet. She didn't know if she was ready having them worrying about her going purple-eyed all the time. But they thought she was _dead_. Didn't she owe them the truth, even if it wasn't her fault?

"My dad…" she began, wondering if she was at all sane for telling them. "He had this accident before I was born. And it did something to his genes. Whatever happened to him, it was dormant for a long time, but… it's loose now."

"What's loose?" asked Charlie, frowning with concern.

I sighed. "Look, I can't say I understand it," she admitted. "I don't know anything about it, nobody does. But the world has changed. We've got aliens starting intergalactic wars, people with… _abilities_. What happened to my dad, it… it gave him abilities. He could make fire with nothing but his hands. Purple fire. And his eyes would glow purple when he did, and it wasn't really just fire, it was some sort of energy thing, I don't _know_, but…" Jess looked at them desperately. They had to understand that she wasn't her dad. She needed them to understand that she was still just Jess. "It's in his genes," she said helplessly. "They think… they think that I might have it, too." She looked at their faces, searching for fear or doubt, but all she saw was worry. She supposed that was a good sign, so she continued. "And SHIELD… well, they're kind of rough around the edges, I guess. And since I don't have anybody anymore, they could do whatever they wanted with me. They could test me, see if I had it or not. Except they don't know what they're looking for. And they were going to do whatever necessary. The Avengers… I guess they didn't want me to get hurt."

Horror. Disbelief. Anger. One of those had to be on their faces. It only made sense. But she didn't even see pity, not exactly. Just… sympathy.

And Amy hugged her a third time. "You're gonna be fine," she said fiercely. "You're not gonna have it, and even if you do, we'll get through it. We'll all get through it, together. It's what we _do_."

Jess smiled. "Thank you," she whispered, and looked at Charlie to let him know she meant him as well. He gave her a watery smile in return.

"So," she said, sniffling, pulling away from Amy. "Did they do a memorial thing in school for me?"

"Yeah," said Amy, smiling at the memory. "It was horrible."

"They were so full of crap," agreed Charlie. "The principal talked about a bunch of amazing qualities you literally never had in any point of your life and what a privilege it was to have met you."

"What?" I laughed. "That is such bullshit, she didn't know I existed!"

"They still have a bunch of pictures on one of the walls," said Charlie.

"Nooo," I groaned. "Really?"

"Yeah, it's so ridiculous."

"Ugh, idiots. They're gonna take it down though, right?"

"I think they're gonna keep it up until you see it's there," said Amy. "To let you see they _care_."

"Of course they care, I've always known they care," Jess said immediately. "All my friends are in that school and the teachers have always been so supporting, they don't need a stupid memorial wall."

"Maybe you should tell them that," Amy pointed out. "I bet they'd all be really flattered, and it'd be really sweet seeing as we all thought you fucking died."

"Don't be ridiculous," Jess told her. "I just came back from the dead, I don't want people thinking I've gone insane with grief. Speaking of going insane, I've missed about a year's worth of gossip, so you two are gonna have to fill the gaps for me."

And the three kids sat down on some swings, like they always used to do when things were fine, and they talked, and they were best friends again.

* * *

When people thought of the Avengers, they thought of a group. And when people thought of groups, they tended to forget some things. Like the fact that every group, no matter how close or similar, is made out of whole different people, who each have different characteristics and different lives and different memories. Different everythings.

Jess really wasn't that much different, and though it didn't take her long to realize, understanding how different the Avengers really were from one another was a process. Soon enough, the Avengers weren't just 'the Avengers' anymore. They were more than an idea. They were _people_. And they had different everythings.

Tony was the most talkative. It took Jess about two days to work out just how much he hated uncomfortable silence. She wasn't sure why yet, but she had a feeling she'd work that out, too. Sometimes he'd retreat to his workshop and be on his own for hours (one time even days), but whenever people were around, the need to speak came. He'd go far to make conversations, using humor and nostalgia and small-talk. It surprised Jess, but she discovered she enjoyed it.

Pepper talked a lot, too. She was probably the most responsible person in the Tower, and worked as much as she breathed, something Jess greatly admired, but she still found the time to chat. She'd ask Jess about school and her friends and about everything altogether. It didn't annoy Jess. It was all so genuine and real and basically human that Jess just felt cared for, and that was a major guilty pleasure right there.

But apart from Tony and Pepper, everyone was about as chatty and talkative as the average person. Well, near everyone.

Bruce Banner confused Jess.

Jess liked to think she was good at understanding people. It allowed her to figure out a lot about the things going on in the heads of the people around her, and even when she got things wrong she almost always had _something_ she could tell.

She didn't have that with Bruce.

Bruce wasn't just quiet. Quiet she knew. Bruce was _tense_ quiet. Jess couldn't tell if he was always like that or if it was only around her, and that took every self-esteem situation she ever had and brought it ringing back. Sometimes, Bruce would get a look on his face, like he had something to say, but he never did, and every time he looked like he regretted it. So Jess couldn't help but wonder.

When the decision to adopt a fully whacked-up teenager is a process that takes less than a day, it really can't be surprising if someone changes their mind, right?

And Jess tried. She tried telling herself that this wasn't the case, that Bruce liked having her around, because he'd give her those awkward smiles of his when they walked by each other.

Of course, he could have been just being polite. After all, he never started conversation with her. He hardly said anything to her, and when he did he seemed sheepish and jittery about it.

Jess enjoyed self-esteem situations as much as any other teenager and all, but it wasn't really just that. She didn't know. She could have been just imagining things. Trust issues were something likely to pop up after what happened to her, she knew, so paranoia would only be a natural reaction. And on the other hand, maybe she wasn't imagining things. Maybe Bruce didn't really like her that much and that was all.

It took her three days of wondering before she asked.

Bruce had just finished a yoga session. He had a thin mattress rolled up and seemed ready to leave the room when Jess stood in its doorway.

He glanced at her, and then looked back down, not really looking her in the eyes. "Hi, Jess," he said, sounding calm enough, but he started picking at the rolled up mattress.

"Hi," Jess said back, hugging herself in her awkwardness.

"What's up?" asked Bruce, and Jess must have looked a bit somber because he straightened up after asking.

Jess hesitated. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," said Bruce with a nod.

Jess contemplated shortly what she was doing. _I'm likely just being paranoid,_ she thought anxiously. _I might hurt Bruce's feelings if I'm wrong. And even if I'm not, I better not say anything. I should just pull a random question out of my ass and pretend everything's fine._ "Do you regret adopting me?"

_Stupid._

Bruce's face crumpled, and Jess felt a nice little spike in her self-hatred levels. "No," he said, confused. "Of course not. Why would you think that?"

"Sorry," said Jess automatically. It seemed she was constantly apologizing nowadays. "I'm sorry, I just… well, you kinda seem to avoid me. You go all quiet and jumpy whenever I'm in the room, and I thought maybe…" She sighed, tripping over her own words. "It's okay if you do, though," she added. "It was a rushed decision, you didn't really have the time to properly consider it, and you've only known me for a few days –"

"Jess," said Bruce firmly. "I don't regret adopting you."

Jess swallowed. "Okay."

"But you're right, I have been avoiding you," he admitted. "And I'm sorry. I was just worried I'd hurt you."

Jess felt a pull inside her chest. "You wouldn't hurt me, Bruce," she said. "I know you wouldn't."

"Not intentionally."

"I'm really not _that_ screwed up," said Jess. "It would actually take a lot to truly hurt me now."

Bruce shook his head. "You don't understand," he said. "I don't mean that I don't want to accidentally say something wrong, although obviously I don't, I mean that I could actually physically hurt you if I'm not careful." He sighed. "It's the beast."

Jess frowned. "But I've seen it," she said. "Well, I heard it, anyway. The day you got me out of that cell, I've heard the Hulk, and it didn't hurt anyone except the person who needed hurting."

"I can't always control it," Bruce explained. "If I change without meaning to, if I get too angry… it's like I'm asleep, and there's something else there instead of me. The first time I changed, I hurt someone I cared about. A lot. And if you get hurt because of me…" he took a deep breath. "I can't risk you like that. I'm a monster, Jess, and there's no changing that."

He seemed so sullen, like he has accepted his fate. Like he gave up.

"You're not a monster, Bruce," said Jess. "I've seen monsters and you're nothing like that."

"You never saw the Hulk when it's loose," Bruce said. "You don't know what it's like."

Jess shrugged. "Then if I ever do, I'll make sure to run for cover. But right now you're not the Hulk, you're you. Honestly, you're probably less a monster than anyone I know. For god's sake, Bruce, you like _yoga_. And I know you do it to stop yourself from hulking out, but come on. You put nutella on everything. You live off herbal teas. You're _Zen_. I can barely take you seriously most of the time, how the hell am I supposed to be afraid of you turning into a big green thing?"

Bruce smiled (finally), revealing his white teeth. "At least you're honest," he quipped.

"It's a gift and a curse," she replied, smiling back. "Seriously, though. I'm not afraid, and I'm the supposed victim in this whole scenario. So I think you shouldn't be afraid, either. You know. Being a superhero and all."

Jess could swear that Bruce blushed a little.

There was no immediate change. That talk, with Bruce sweaty from the yoga with a mattress under his arm and Jess overthinking most details, wasn't the start of a beautiful friendship. But it was a start. It took some getting used to, but eventually Bruce stopped being quiet in group conversations. Jess started asking him for occasional assistance with her homework. They started talking about books, making recommendations and discussing character developments. Bruce would patiently sit across from Jess with amused interest as she ranted about the way this and that ended. Bruce would innocently suggest that maybe she was getting too involved in the stories and remind her that they were just fiction. Jess would hit him with a pillow and tell him that her feelings weren't fictional and that bad endings were a serious problem that needed solving, but they'd both be laughing.

Bruce and Jess were both damaged and screwed up and generally messes. Neither one was coping very well. But they were being damaged and screwed up together, and that was better. So when Bruce got an overly serious look on his face, Jess would crack a joke. And when Jess was caught staring off into space for too long, Bruce would casually mention a part in a book he knew Jess was reluctant to let go, and she'd rant.

So what if Jess still had dark circles beneath her eyes?

* * *

So everything.

It's been a month. A month since the adoption papers, and more than a month since the last time any of them saw Lawrence Cory. Catching up with everything she missed in school was a challenge, but Jess managed with some occasional help. It was funny. Jess was certain she would never have put such efforts into school before her mother's death. She wondered what changed. Maybe she liked that it kept her mind off things. Or maybe she was trying to make a point.

Things were going more or less fine so far. Or at least, so it seemed. Jess was putting on some of old weight back, and despite the fact she was still not really healthy looking yet, she stopped looking like she just crawled out of a desert. Some burn scars remained on her arms and shoulders, but Jess didn't seem to mind. She didn't even try covering it up. She could be seen in the Tower wearing tank tops or T-shirts when it wasn't too cold and didn't think twice about it. After a while, the Avengers stopped seeing them. It became normal.

Jess smiled more often, and was once again quick to laugh as she was before. She joked about the cell sometimes, when Pepper, Steve, Bruce and Thor were out of earshot. Tony, Clint and Natasha were _great_ with dark humor. The others cringed when she made jokes about it, and she learned not to. She didn't mind.

Though really, they should have known better than to think things were good this soon.

The scream penetrated the silent, cool night. Steve Rogers was awake in a heartbeat, running before he could even consciously determine whose scream it was that woke him. It took him just over a second to remember that the rest of the Avengers were on a three-day long mission and that Pepper was staying the night in DC, leaving only one other person in the Tower, unless you counted JARVIS, who wasn't all that likely to scream like a girl at three in the morning.

He threw a door open only to hear a second scream, this time much closer to him. Jess was sitting up in her bed, her eyes wide and her face tear stained, and she was cowering away from him instinctively, just for a moment, before fully processing it was him and relaxing. He had startled her, he realized.

"I'm sorry," she blurted in a panicky voice, thick with tears, that was nothing like the voice of the laughing girl she was just a few hours earlier. "I'm okay, it was just a dream, I'm sorry I woke you, I didn't… I'm sorry."

For several moments Steve found that he couldn't do anything but stare. Whatever it was she dreamed of, it had her terrified. He hated the fact that whatever they did to try and help her, she was still so broken sometimes, and he hated how she always felt the need to apologize for it. More than anything, he hated the girl's father for causing so much harm to his own child, too caught up in his own power and madness to truly see her. Then he noticed that Jess was _shaking _and suddenly he was sitting on her bed next to her and holding her as she broke down. She sobbed helplessly and uncontrollably in his arms, letting pure stress leave her body and mind.

It took her a few minutes to calm down, and Steve didn't try rushing her, but eventually she pulled away, taking deep breathes and running a hand through her hair, which has gone messy when she thrashed around in her sleep. Her hand trembled slightly as she did.

"So," Steve said softly. "What was it?"

Jess knew what he meant. She shrugged. "I don't know," she mumbled. "Memories, mostly, all pressed together in the wrong order. Didn't make it any better, though." She took another shaky breath, and Steve didn't even have to think as he pulled her closer so that she leaned on his shoulder, putting his hand on her hair, stroking it ever so lightly. She didn't try to resist, shutting her eyes and letting Steve's even breathing sooth her. "How the hell did this happen?" she whispered. "Life used to be normal, or as close to it as I could manage. Things were good, and they were supposed to get better, not fall into a pit of crap. I used to be mostly okay. It wasn't perfect but I could live with it. And now I'm not even that." She sighed. "How does this happen?" she muttered again. "How does a life become something else entirely?"

"Sometimes the world is hard," Steve answered, just as quietly. "Sometimes it's cruel and cold and tries to weigh you down. But that's not all there is. Sometimes the world's a good place to live in."

"Yeah," murmured Jess. "I know. It just gets hard to remember sometimes. And I don't know if I'm going to be okay. I say I am, and most of the time I believe it, but… I'm fifteen years old. I should be stressed about school and parties and boys. This is not what my life was supposed to look like. I just want to be okay already."

"You'll be okay," Steve said. "We'll help make you okay, I promise. We will always be here for you. We won't give up on you. Ever."

The ends of Jess's lips twitched into a small smile. "Thank you," she whispered, sounding as small as she did in the cell, but there was a touch of light in her words. Steve felt that light, deep in his chest. "I don't know where I'd be if it wasn't for you." Jess's weight on his shoulder was suddenly gone when she got up from the bed and straightened up, rubbing the last of tears and sleep from her eyes. "I'm gonna make some coffee," she said. "No sleep for me tonight. You should go back to bed, though." And she walked out of the room without another word, eyes cast to the floor, her bare feet padding at the floor lightly.

Sometimes saving people was more than just pulling them out of the danger. Sometimes saving people was a process, long and hard and exhausting. And as SHIELD always had to remind them, it was impossible to save everyone.

And in that moment, sitting alone on Jess's bed at three a.m., Steve knew he was ready to give his life in order to save that girl. For the first time, it hit him just how hard he was willing to fight for her.

He wasn't going back to bed.

He found Jess in the kitchen, her back turned to him. She was fumbling with the coffee machine. If she heard him come in, she showed no sign of it. She must have, though, because she didn't act surprised when he spoke.

"You know, we used to make amazing hot chocolate back when I was about your age," he reminisced. "My mother, she had a whole method. When she could, she'd have me get my best friend over – we were practically brothers – and she'd make us some. It was divine. She taught me, and after she passed away I started making it sometimes too. It was the best thing when one of us was feeling down."

Jess didn't look at him, but she didn't put the capsule into the machine. Instead she stopped, her hands on the counter, listening.

"It's all different now, of course," said Steve. "I can afford hot chocolate whenever I want it, but it took me a while to figure out how to get it right. I had to change my mom's old ritual a bit, but eventually I learned how to make it so that it tastes the same. Nat made me try out about everything they have in Starbucks and none of that tasted as good as my mother's hot chocolate." He took a few steps closer to Jess until he was next to her, the counter cold against his hips. She looked up. He was over a head taller than her and she almost had to strain her neck to meet his eyes. "I can make my mother's hot chocolate if you want."

Jess just nodded. She didn't say anything as he made it, but mumbled a thank you as he handed her the mug of steaming brown thick liquid. She said nothing as she took her mug to the lounge and nothing as he followed her with his own mug. She curled up on the end of the sofa, pulling her legs to her chest with the cup held gingerly in her hands, before she started talking again.

"What was his name?" she asked. "Your friend's?"

Steve smiled. "His name was Bucky," he said. "We've been best friends since we were kids. He used to pull me out of fights with guys twice as big as me before the serum."

Jess smiled. "He sounds like a great guy."

"Yeah." Steve's smile turned a bit sad. "He was."

"Did he pass away while you were in the ice?" she asked. Steve got the impression she didn't ask just out of curiosity. He had a feeling she was paying him back for comforting her just a few minutes past.

One day, he thought to himself, he was going to find out how she understood so much so easily. How she knew Bucky didn't die old, because she definitely figured that out. How she knew Steve didn't talk about Bucky since he was defrosted, and how she knew he wanted to.

"No," said Steve. "He didn't. We, uh…" he cleared his throat as his eyes became glazed over. He was somewhere else now. He was back in that train, watching as the puzzle pieces that led to Bucky's death fell into place. "We were on one of Hydra's trains, and it was going on the edge of a mountain when we were found. The wall got blasted, and Bucky fell. There was nothing I could do." He forced a smile. "I guess we're both a bit messed up."

Jess smiled at that. "I think everybody's messed up," she said. "There isn't a person in the world who's never been hurt. The world's not divided into people who are happy and people who got hurt. You get different levels of pain, different depths of the scars, and then you choose how you handle your pain."

Steve shook his head. "You're fifteen," he said. "How do you even know that stuff?"

Jess shrugged. "I do a lot of reading. Plus I'm pretty smart."

"You're not bad," agreed Steve.

"It doesn't always do much good, though," Jess pointed out. "I read a lot and I'm smart, so I know it can take a really long time to recover from something like what happened to me. And since I know that I should accept it. But I guess some things are easier said than done, and I've always had an impatient side. It's only been a month, and in terms of mental recovery it's nothing, but I'd just like to have it behind me, you know? I'm sick of being scared of my dreams. I just want it to be a memory. Then I'd be able to move on. But I'm not even sure it's possible to move on."

"It's always possible," said Steve, and for a moment actually believed himself.

"Not always," said Jess. "Most parents never move on from the death of their child. I didn't lose my child, but…" She bit her lip. "I miss Emmett. I miss him so much it's like there's this _thing_ in my chest, pulling and squeezing all the damn time. He wasn't my kid, but… he was mine. And after Mom, protecting him was my job. It was the only thing I lived for. He was my purpose. And he died. So for a while I didn't have anything to live for. I thought Lawrence would kill me too eventually, or keep me in the cell so long I'd go crazy like him. But I didn't die, I got out, and I have a life again. But I don't have Emmett or my mom, and that's fucking bullshit."

Steve didn't know what to say to that. He didn't know what losing a younger brother was like. But he knew what it was like to lose a mother. "You never talk about her, you know," he noted. "Your mom, I mean."

"I know," said Jess. "And I'll never stop feeling guilty for missing her less, because she deserves more. She was an amazing person and a strong woman. She kicked her husband out the moment she saw him as a threat to her kids, and raised us on her own. She was kickass at her job and was socially active. She pushed me to do better and was supportive at the same time. She believed in me. She was astounding, and she stopped existing in a blink of an eye and it was cruel and unfair. I do miss her. I don't know why I don't talk about her. I don't talk about my family in general, except for my dad, who wasn't really my family at all. I suppose it's just another part of me being really screwed up and emotionally scarred."

They kept talking about painful subjects for about an hour longer. Painful subjects had a tendency to become less painful with amazing hot chocolate made how somebody's mother used to make it, which ultimately made them much easier to discuss. And when Pepper came back the next morning and saw a damaged girl snuggled up against a damaged super-soldier, both of them sound asleep, empty mugs on the coffee table in front of them, she just smiled to herself, and felt hopeful.

* * *

It's odd how the most dramatic things happen on normal days.

You never see the storm about to hit. You never see the meteor dropping out of the sky. You never see the oncoming avalanche. You only realize it's there when you're hit, and then it's too late to stop it. Not that you could ever stop it, even if you knew it was coming. Some people call it destiny, some call it coincidence, and some say it's divine intervention. However you chose to explain it, there was no denying that sometimes bad things happened, and certain bad things were bound to happen and were even necessary.

So it was a normal day when the world was turned upside down all over again.

"So," said Jess. "I think there's still an obvious question standing."

Amy and Charlie looked at her with amused expressions from the other side of the table. Since Jess got back the three picked back up the old habit of going out for cheap food every once in a while, and with all the excitement about Jess being alive it happened often enough.

"Why are you both still single?"

They laughed. "Because we're unattractive as hell," said Amy. "What's your excuse?"

"Erm," said Jess. "Locked up. Ten months. Presumed dead."

"Hmm," said Amy with an unimpressed expression. "Whatever."

Jess grinned, wondering what she did to deserve Amy and Charlie. "Seriously, though. I know we're just fifteen, but not even one date? In all that time? Neither of you?"

"Nope," said Charlie.

"And you didn't even have any crushes?"

"Not on anyone real or who's aware of my existence," said Amy.

"Unaware of your existence meaning what, random cute guy at school?" asked Jess hopefully.

"More like Luke Evans and Dean O'Gorman. And their characters in The Hobbit, naturally."

Jess sighed along with Amy and Charlie chuckled. "You're right," Jess admitted. "I don't know what I'm doing talking about actual dating while they're out there in the world."

"Exactly," said Amy, taking a bite out of one of her French fries.

"And on top of that is the fact that we're the only people who can stand each other, so…" Charlie reminded her.

Jess grinned. "You're not, though," she said with sudden sincerity. "Unattractive, I mean. You're both the most beautiful people I know."

"I love you," said Amy seriously. Charlie simply grinned. "You're beautiful too, you know."

"Thanks," Jess replied politely, not bothering to wonder whether or not it was true. Amy said it and meant it, so it didn't matter.

"Oh!" Charlie blurted, sitting up suddenly, making Jess raise an amused eyebrow at him. "I met a new cat in my street yesterday."

Jess kept her grin as Charlie talked about the cat. He liked the cats in his street, and Jess loved the way he'd go excited when talking about them. She often called him a crazy cat lady, but really she enjoyed seeing him this happy.

However, she stopped listening very quickly. There was a strange sensation in his fingertips. Like a tingling, but strange. Nothing Jess has ever felt before. It didn't feel numb, it felt… vibrant. Normally she would've shrugged it off, but she found she couldn't. It was like she started to daydream and couldn't stop. The outside world, though still very much there, became invisible to her. There was only the unfamiliar tingling, and at the edge of her mind, a sound. Like something trying to break through.

"Jess," said Amy, bringing her back to reality. "You with us?"

"Oh, yeah," said Jess with an apologetic smile. "Sorry, I spaced out for a moment there. That Luke Evans comment really caught me off-guard."

_Liar_.

_Shut up._

The quick inner dialogue in Jess's head was short-lived as the conversation went elsewhere, and Jess forgot all about the tingling in her fingertips, which disappeared the way it came.

She felt the tingling again hours later, alone in her bedroom in the Avengers Tower. Alone, and with no distractions.

She stared at her fingertips as they tingled, vaguely wondering why they were tingling. It was hard to wonder at anything with the sound in her head. She couldn't define it if she tried. But it kept getting stronger and stronger, along with the tingling. Her hands began to shake, and the sound just grew more powerful. She felt like it was going to crack open her skull. It built up, the way pressure does in a pressure pot. The tingling wasn't tingling anymore. It was heat. And her fingers kept getting warmer and it wasn't just her fingers anymore as much as her whole hands and the sound kept getting louder and louder and louder until-

_SNAP_.

The sound stopped. The pressure was gone. And the feeling in Jess's hands was one of sheer power.

Jess held purple fire in her trembling hands, and her tear-filled eyes were glowing purple.


End file.
